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CHICAGO AND NEW YORK: 

BELFOKD, CLAEKE & CO, 

1885. 



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Copyright, 
Wm. Penn Nixon, 

1885. 



DNOHUE & Henneberry, Printei-s and Binders, Chicago. 



PEEFACE. 

The letters which compose this volume originated in 
a conversation between three persons in regard to the 
causes of democratic ascendency in our national affairs 
under the nominal leadership of Mr. Cleveland and 
the consequences likely to result therefrom. The 
views of these individuals were in the main harmonious 
and seemed to me novel and striking. Because of this 
I arranged for their publication. 

These three persons alone are cognizant of the 
authorship of the letters. Whether each is the product 
of one or more; whether they were written by one in- 
dependently of the others; or whether part are written 
by one and the remainder by the others I have no 
means of knowing. 

Of one thing I am assured. The object of their 
preparation was not assault upon Mr. Cleveland person- 
ally. None of those who were engaged in their pro- 
duction were animated by a feeling of personal hostility, 
nor could any of them have been moved by any petty 
desire to annoy. With such a purpose these letters 
Avould have been but another instance of 

"An ocean into tempest tossed, 
To waft a feather or to drown a fly." 

It was simply considered Mr. Cleveland's misfortune 
that he was the choice of the democratic party, and 
the misfortune of the democratic party that it had 
chosen Mr. Cleveland. The conjunction of a man of 



6 PKEFACE. 

such peculiar characteristics and a party of such inher- 
ent proclivities placed in control of the government 
at the close of so remarkable an epoch in the nation's 
history was regarded by the persons referred to as a 
matter of such significance that it ought not to be 
allowed to pass unnoticed, but for the sake of the 
public should be impressed upon the mind of every 
citizen. In this view the writer of this preface fully 
concurred, though only vaguely aware of the line of 
thought to be pursued, and in no manner responsible 
for the specific ideas advanced. Siva, be he one or 
several, has set forth his own ideas in his own manner. 
So far as they touch upon the known facts of the past 
each reader will judge them for himself. So far as 
i^iey concern themselves with the probabilities of the 
future, the events of the next four years Avill confirm 
or refute their prognostications. 

The Avidespread interest which the letters attracted 
in the columns of the Inter Ocean is the reason of their 
republication in book form. Wliatever may be the 
verdict in regard to their literary merit, there can be 
no question that they will attract very general atten- 
tion to a most important phase of our political life. 

Wm. Penn Nixon. 

Chicago, March 2, 1885. 



TABLE OF CONTENTS. 

No. PAGE. 

I. The Apotheosis of Phlegm 9 

II. The Fabrication of Integrity .... 22 

III. " Nay, MY Good Friend " 33 

IV. " Silence AND Darkness— Solemn Sisters " . 46 
V. Action and Inaction Mutually Equal ... 60 

VI. " Sauce for THE Goose " 75 

VII. "Confirmation Strong as Proofs from Holy 

Writ" 88 

VIII. De MI^^IMIS NON CURAT LEX 102 

IX. ReQUIESCAT in PACE . * 112 

X. " What Hammers Wrung! what Anvils Beat! " 125 

XI. Who is Siya? 139 

XII. Thine Enemy's Array 152 

^ XIII. The Stock in Trade 167 

XIV. Tristam L'hermite. . . . . . . 182 

XV. Who will be President 189 

XVI. Moving In 203 

XVII. To-morrow's Morrow 214 

XVIII. To the President 221 



A Man of Destiny. 



No. I. 

THE APOTHEOSIS OF PHLEGM. 

To Grover Cleveland, President-Elect : 

2fy Dear Sir, — I do not address you by the title of 
"excellency," which custom has permitted to be be- 
stowed upon persons holding the position you now 
occupy, because I wish to write to you in that other 
and newer capacity, Avhich, because it was so much 
grander than any prince or potentate had ever enjoj^ed, 
our forefathers, by express denial of ever}^ possible 
form or character of title, did in effect affirmatively 
decree should have no distinguishing term save that of 
"President." It was their firm behef that he Avho 
might be selected by the people of a great nation to 
represent their power, by the manhood yf a people to 
represent its strength, by the life of c". land to repre- 
sent its life, should be so great in character, so excellent 
in fame, so exalted in virtue, and so eminent in all 
manly attributes that only one word should be used to 
designate the fact that the Nation had cast upon his 
shoulders the mantle of leadership. So, neither " hon- 
orable " nor " excellency," nor even " most illustrious," 
as the Father of his country desired to be called, would 

9 



10 A MAX OF DESTINY. 

they countenance or endure, but simply " president " — 
leader at once and follower, creature of the public will 
and servant of its purpose; at the same time sitting 
upon a level of the hearthstone with the humblest citi- 
zen, and standing proudly beside the throne the peer 
of the haughtiest sovereign. The very shado\y of this 
title, which is soon to be bestowed upon you, should 
hide all other dignities that may have been worn be- 
fore. You are now Grover Cleveland, citizen. "When 
the moon shall have waxed and waned a few times 
more you will be Grover Cleveland, president. 

As a citizen, your life has been one of the least 
notable among the sixty million of people whose 
honor, aspiration, and moral grandeur you will soon 
be called upon to represent. If you had chanced to 
have died about the time your predecessor in the presi- 
dential office was elected, hardly one outside of the 
city where you lived would have known the fact. If 
by some strange accident the dispatches of the Asso- 
ciated Press had scattered your name as a notable dece- 
dent broadcast over the land you are now called upon 
to govern, it would have been almost impossible for 
even the most diligent student, a hundred miles away 
from the place of your abode, to have located the man 
whose decease was announced, or give any plausible 
reason why the customary mourning cards should not 
have been the limit of notoriety assigned to you. 

Although the surprise which attended your nomina- 
tion by a party to which you were almost unknown 
Avas equaled only by that arising from your election 
by a people to whom you had become so exceedingly 



A MAN OF DESTINY. 11 

well known, yet I am probably doing no injustice, even 
to your intelligence, in assuming that to no man in the 
country were these events matter of such exceedingly 
great surprise as to yourself. Knowing, as j^ou do, 
how little worthy of note your life has been, and how 
utterly barren your mind and character are of all those 
elements usually accounted needful to a fit exemplifica- 
tion of our American life, it must be with some sense 
of dizziness that you find yourself about to be hoisted 
upon the pinnacle of national power as the representa- 
tive headlight of American statesmanship. 

Fortunately, your nature is by no means a sensitive 
one. You were kindly endowed with a temperament 
which, while it may have certain disadvantages, is not 
without solid and substantial recompense, in that it 
saves you from those petty annoyances which "the 
slings and arrows of outrageous fortune " so often in- 
flict upon more sensitive souls. JN'ot only have you 
cause to rejoice in a cuticle which a pachyderm might 
envy, but a fatty and sluggish sensorium combined 
therewith renders you almost impervious to unpleasant 
sensations, and enables you not only to endure without 
discomfort but absolutely to derive enjoyment from 
associations so coarse and brutif^^ing to ordinary nat- 
ures, as quickly to sicken and overwhelm a less 
robustuous manhood. To such natures as yours, how- 
ever, this asssociation is needful as a healthy and 
proper stimulant. The tallest trees grow in the rank- 
est soils, and the mightiest natures when thus grossly 
housed must strike their roots deep into the lowest 
strata of societv. Thrice enviable is the nature that 



12 A MAX OF DESTINY. 

not only derives no harm from exposure amid the 
lower levels of humanity, but absolutely gathers 
strength and beauty from those things which weaken 
and destroy less favored organisms. It is thus that 
our good mother nature provides for those whom her 
presence forsees are likely to be exposed to changeful 
vicissitudes so potent as to endanger life itself, if the 
comparatively small amount of nerve and brain were 
not carefully packed in masses of protecting fatty 
cells and shielded from assault by an epidermis so 
coarsely woven and insensible as to defy the penetra- 
bility of any ordinary " arrows" and resist the potency 
of ordinary " slings." 

Thus equipped, the walrus revels in the frozen sea 
that breaks in silence about the undiscovered pole. The 
elephant stalks through the jungles heedless of the 
equatorial sun, and the hippopotamus pursues its peace- 
ful Avay through the sedgy marshes, heedless alike of 
enemy or accident. It may awaken wonder that nature 
should take such care to protect existences apparently 
of so little intrinsic value, but she has a perverse 
method of choosing her own instrumentalities. It would 
not seem to the casual observer that the monsters who 
fed and fought amid the turbid, steaming waters of the 
Pliocene era were creatures likely to be of great service 
to that nobler race to whom afterward was given the 
empire of the world, yet careful nature is so true to 
her instinct of preserving and consecrating all things to 
human use, that even the most unworthy product of 
this uncouth existence is to-da}^ the source from which 
our newest agricultural impulse springs, and to which 



A MAX OF DESTIXY. 13 

science owes the potency of that mystic wand which it 
waves over exhausted fields and malvcs them ricli with 
the promise of new life. The moral and political world 
not seldom follows the analogy of the material universe. 
Tlie inference may not seem a flattering one, but in 
seeking a key by which such mysteries as your election 
may be solved, the student of social phenomena should 
not hesitate in drawing conclusions from the analogies 
thus afforded. There is little doubt that civilization, as 
well as vegetation, is sometimes coprolitic in its char- 
acter, and it does not become any man to speak lightly 
of any element that may be essential to the future 
development of our race. Unlikely as it may seem to 
the superficial observer, it is quite possible, my dear sir, 
that nature made you as you are in order that by some 
wondrous alchemy the far-distant future might receive 
unexpected good from the reaction necessarv for the 
expulsion of a noxious irritant. At least, it is fortunate 
for you that nature has armed you thus effectively 
against the stings of contempt and scorn, as well as of 
malice and envy. To those who are called to sit in 
high places such panoply is of priceless value. 

You are, indeed, a happy man. ^ot -only are you 
thus fitted by nature to enjoy the good fortune that 
has so unexpectedly come upon you, but you are also 
in your own being the refutation of some oft-repeated 
and weakly believed aphorisms. It has long been the 
well-settled belief of philosophers that he who becomes 
a leader of humanit}^ must first have shown himself a 
thinker and a doer, or else a sufferer, to whom the 
hopes and fears, the cares and aspirations of his age 



14 A MAN OF DESTINY. 

have been made patent by sweat of brain or heart. It 
is a favorite delusion that in a republic he who rises to 
the head, who is chosen to lead the clamoring, hoping, 
toiling masses, must first have felt their hope and 
shared their toil, or, at the very least, have pointed out 
some new way by which they may hope to achieve de- 
liverance. The soldier, the scholar, the statesman, may 
any of them justly and reasonably aspire to the leader- 
ship which a free nation gives by choice to the fittest 
of her sons, but none of these, it has been heretofore 
believed, has any reason to expect success or prefer- 
ence among a free people, unless he shall first have 
proved himself a patriot, and been brought near to the 
public heart by self -forgetful regard for the common 
weal. All of these silly notions you have, at one fell 
swoop of unmatched luck, annihilated and destro3^ed. 
You are neither a scholar, a statesman, nor a soldier, 
and are entitled to no little credit for setting up no 
claim to any such distinction. If yon have the capacity 
to be either, it is yet undeveloped, and very probably 
unknown and unsuspected, even to ^^ourself. So, too, 
you have yet to exhibit any manifestations of patriot- 
ism sufficiently striking to be visible to the naked eye. 
Almost a quarter of a century ago, while you were 
still in the flush of early manhood, when youth's hot 
blood is not supposed to have entirely cooled, the nation 
of which you and I were humble and insignificant 
atoms encountered a peril so great that the thrill of 
her agony seemed to Avring every fiber of even the 
least of the segregated entities composing her exist- 
ence. No doubt you felt some fluttering about the 



A MAiN OF DESTINY. li> 

heart in the contemplation of the vast convulsion which 
impended. As the mighty throes of the immortal 
struggle came on one after the other, wrenching the 
sinews of the land, drenching its fields with blood and 
its hearths with tears, it is impossible that even you 
should have looked on quite unmoved. 'No doubt the 
impulse to take some part in the great events, amid the 
tumults of which your young life floated emptily on 
like a storm-tossed egg-shell, must have shaped itself 
more or less clearly to your consciousness and led your 
dreaming fancy away to fields were patriotism avouched 
its sincerity by suffering and death. Such was the 
even temper of your mind, however, such the calm, 
cool equipoise of your desire, that the pleading cry of 
an imperiled nation was insufficient to awaken in your 
mind a determination to forego even for a brief inter- 
val the comforts and delights of civilized and unim- 
periled surroundings. With a slight change the com- 
mendation addressed to Mazeppa might be applied to 
you and the country truthfully say of your life in that 
hour of supreme emergency: 

" Of all my train there is not one, 
Wlio less hath said or less hath done, 
Than thou." 

Now we know how providential was the self-restraint 
which then seemed worthy of a harsher name. Had 
you lightly been led to pursue " the bubble reputation 
at the cannon's mouth," I shudder to contemplate where 
the reversioner of the hiHiest honor of the land mio^ht 
have been to-day. Instead of a face rubicund with the 
delight of unexpected and unexampled success, and a 



16 A MAN OF DESTINY. 

brow crowned with unearned laurels, we might have 
been compelled to ask the buzzards who gorged on 
patriotic dead at Gettysburg to account for that pres- 
ence which is now the cynosure of so many envious eyes. 
You no doubt felt Avithin your soul even at that time 
the quickening throbs of a high destiny and unprece- 
dented luck, and because of this marvelous prescience, 
you folded your arms amid the tumult of strife and 
hummed a then popular melody, "Wait for the 
Wagon," A\4th the roar of cannon in the distance 
sounding a refrain. The wagon has come — the gilded 
chariot which will bear you over the heads of all those 
who fought, up to the highest seat of power. 

In this no doubt was first manifested your especial 
fitness for the great destiny which has fallen upon you. 
Xo ordinary nature could have withstood the enthusi- 
astic patriotism of that day, Xo man, save one who 
counted all things in strict relation to his own personal 
enjoyment, could have regarded as vain and unworthy 
of consideration all those questions affecting the public 
welfare which did not directly and maieriaAly tend to 
enhance or diminish the delights and comforts of his 
own surroundings, could have endured those four years 
of unprecedented exaltation, of alternating hope and 
fear, and have waited patiently by the river of time for 
the flotsam of political preferment to come within his 
reach so that he might grasp and hold without exertion, 
without self-sacrifice, without the privation of a sol- 
dier's life or the fear of a soldier's death, the honor 
which a grateful country hastens now to bestow upon 
such exalted and phenomenal self-control. 



A MAN OF DESTINY. 17 

Hitherto our American idea of fame and merit has 
been of an active, occidental character. It has been 
accepted as a universal rule that the rewards of life, 
whether of a business or political or even of a literary 
or religious character, should be given to those active 
spirits who perform and achieve, rather than to those 
who manifest the supremacy of their natures by re- 
maining callous and insensible to current events — obliv- 
ious to the hopes and fears of their fellow mortals — 
the doom and destiny of all existences except them- 
selves. The devotees of Siva understand much better 
the measure of true greatness in man. According to 
their wisdom it is the power to do nothing that makes 
the great god Brahma tremble on the throne of the 
universe. It is only that man who is great enough to 
abstain from all effort, to allow his powers to ripen in 
slumber and silence, to look with calmness upon human 
suffering, to take no part in and have no care for any 
of those things which men call great and glorious and 
desirable — it is these alone whom the profound oriental 
philosophers regard as the real kings of men and the 
potential conquerors of heaven. To secure such excel- 
lence the Brahman withdraws himself from society, 
avoids with scrupulous care all the surroundings of 
home, excludes the name of wife and children from his 
vocabulary, shuts out of his consciousness every thought 
that might stimulate him to exertion, and only waits 
and meditates in solitude and silence upon himself, the 
dormant possibilities of his undeveloped nature and 
the glories that will surround ^his name when he shall 
have eclipsed all men in the power of non-performance 
2 



18 A MAN OF DESTINY. 

and risen to the level of the gods themselves in the 
capacity to do nothing. "While more than one has 
heretofore attempted to introduce into our political 
system the irresistible power of immutable passivity as 
the real measure of excellence, according to which the 
rewards of fame ought to be distributed, to you, my 
dear sir, is due the merit of having first received at the 
hands of the American people the substantial testi- 
mony that the wisdom of the orient is finally coming 
in to supercede the rawness and freshness of our occi- 
dental life. 

It is not to be supposed that you would be able to 
take the very highest rank amon^ those pious anchor- 
ites who for so many years have excluded not only the 
pleasures of life but even the light of day, and almost 
the breath of heaven from their existence, but, consid- 
ered as an American, it is beyond controversy that you 
have succeeded marvelously well in doing nothing and 
in deadening your nature to the influence of all those 
chords of public sentiment which so thrill the hearts 
even of our humblest citizens. Your seclusion, too, al- 
though in one sense it may have been as complete as 
that of the Yananvasin, was hardly such as is enjoined 
upon the religious hermit. He is directed by the holy 
writings " to repair to the lonely wood, dwell there in 
some small cave or in a hut formed by his own hands." 
I sadly fear that " rooms in a business block," even in 
the city of Buffalo, would hardly be regarded by "the 
three great watchers over human destiny " as an equiv- 
alent. It is true that account should be taken of dif- 
ference in climate. What might be deemed a very 



A MAN OF DESTINY. 19 

comfortable hermitage on the melting plains of India 
would be entirely " too thin " for the north-east corner 
of Lake Erie, with the ice fiends rushing down from 
the pole over thousands of miles of unbroken crystal 
slieen, dancing about his ears at the average rate of 
seventy-two miles an hour, and recalling even the stur- 
diest hermit from the sweet delirium of upward-lifting 
meditation by pricks of crystal-spears, chill-tempered 
at some forty degrees below zero. Besides that — or 
perhaps for this, too, the climate may bear the blame— 
the oriental self-exalter was forbidden, if he would 
reach the heaven of his desires, to look upon any 
woman's face. Though one had borne to him the holy 
relation of wife, he was required to cast her off and 
even to forget that he had ever loved. The pioneer 
in a great movement calculated to reverse the ideas of 
a nation or a people, cannot be expected to compete 
in the perfection of his exemplification of the new 
philosophy with those who for ages have made a study 
of its methods and details. 

'No doubt you did the best you could under the cir- 
cumstances, and you seem, in all essential particulars, 
to have followed with commendable faithfulness in this 
respect the injunctions of the Brahmins. Ceteris pari- 
bus, it is not to be doubted tliatyou would have proved 
yourself as much superior to the oriental devotee in 
the power of accomplishing the least in the longest 
possible time, as you have under the present unfavor- 
able circumstances, in the same exalted attainment, 
overmatched the average American. At least, my 



20 A MAN OF DESTINY. 

dear sir, you have what the most devoted Brahmin has 
never yet been able to boast of liaving acquired, the 
apparent, tangible, indubitable, demonstrable proof 
that by persevering, consistent and uninterrupted occlu- 
sion of the life of the great world by w^hich you are 
surrounded you have, even before age has tinted the 
thatched abode of wisdom, obtained a seat among the 
immortals. Whether the philosophy which has served 
you so well in securing preferment may be relied upon 
to befriend you in like manner in the future is a ques- 
tion not easy of solution. Time, you know, is the 
great and inflexible avenger. Sometimes he burnishes 
the rusty shield found in the dead hand on life's great 
battlefield so that the ages never cease to see the glim- 
mer of its sheen. Again he tears from the exultant 
helm the wreath of victory and sends the boastful 
wearer down the corridors of the future with the cow- 
ard's brand upon his brow. I am an old man and have 
seen many of these^reversals of the verdicts of to-day. 
In the slumbi^ous orient the power to do nothing may 
strike terror to the hearts of the gods, but in our mock- 
ing Occident it is much more likely to awaken ridicule 
in the hearts of the people. ^' Ex nihil, nihil fit^^ is an 
aphorism too deeply ingrained in the American nature 
to be overturned by the example of a single presiden- 
tial resultant of such evolution. Thus far in the world's 
history it is only the doer whom the avenger's infinite 
scorn of weakness and pretense has spared. What 
will be your fate, now that the crucial test is to be 
applied — the test which leaves the brightness of the 



A MAN OF DESTINY. 21 

gem untarnished, but shrivels black the sham, which 
vanishes at length in smoke and stench — the world 
waits anxiously to see. Siva. 

New York, December 10. 



'No. II. 

THE FABKICATIOISr OF IISTTEGEITY. 

To GpvOver Cleveland, Presiclent-Elect : 

3Iy Dear Sii^ — Objection has been made in some 
quarters to my former letter, that I indulged in too 
great plainness of speech considering the fact that I 
was addressing one about to be clothed with snch 
exalted honor as awaits you upon the fourth of March 
next. There are many reasons why I have decided to 
address these lexers directly to you, and to use in them 
only tlie plainest forms of English prose. Knowing 
your nature as I do, I am well satisfied that in address- 
ing you all flowers of speech woukl be as vain as 
widows' weeds in an appeal to the great Destroyer. 

" Gray has noted the waste of breath 
In addressing the dull, cold ear of Death," 

but it is nothing compared with the folly of that man 

who should waste tropes and similies upon one of your 

peculiar intellectual fiber. It is not your fault, " since 

Nature cannot choose its origin," that you are 

" Deaf to adjective, noun and particle, 
Deaf even to the definite article," 

unless applied to your own individuality with a direct- 
ness which would shock one less impregnably in- 
trenched in a Gibraltar of egotistic equanimity. The 
multitudes who are now seeking to gain j^our favor in 
the guise of friends as little understand your character 

32 



A MAN OF DESTINY. 23 

in this respect as those who seek to wound by jest or 
taunt. They both entirely fail to appreciate the temper 
of that marvelous mail of self -approval which surrounds 
your consciousness like the armor of the archangel, 
" luminous yet dense," through which his celestial soul 
shone resplendent, though impregnable to all attack. 
This adamantine barrier of unruffled self-complacency 
is impervious alike to flattery and gibe. Xo love of 
commendation or fear of disfavor can break through 
this invisible shield which guards you from too near 
approach alike of foes and familiars, since no flattery 
can equal your own self-appreciation and your self- 
approval is so profound that you are unable to credit 
any threat of disapproval on the part of others. To 
the most fulsome flattery your mind yields a ready 
assent, but is quite undisturbed and entirely unbiased 
thereby. Your judgment is quite unclouded by the 
eloquence of unbridled adulation, since at its highest 
flight it is still infinitely below your own idea of what 
3^ou are entitled to receive. So, too, you are invincible 
to an}^ threat of public disfavor since you are unable 
to conceive of a public so foolish and unjust as to regard 
yourself or your acts with disapproval. 

This peculiarity of youi> nature is so rare among man- 
kind that although tacitly recognized by those accus- 
tomed to approach you most nearly, neither friends 
nor foes have formulated or appreciated the same. It 
is as far removed from ordinary vanity as it is from 
that devotion to a great idea which anihilates all 
thought of self. It is as unlike the consuming patriot- 
ism which rendered Lincoln unconscious of his own 



24 A MAN OF DESTINY. 

greatiless as it is unrelated to the nervous self -conscious- 
ness which rendered Hayes so unceasingly anxious lest 
any one should detect his infinite littleness and ]3he- 
nomenal \Yeakness. The self-love of the latter was 
perhaps as great as your own, but it had no such back- 
ing of impervious confidence in its justness and univer- 
sal recognition. Your self-devotion is the result of no 
petty personal pride. You have none of the peacock's 
exultation in the beholder's admiration of the glories 
of his caudal appendage nor any of his chagrin when 
he notes that the watchers eyes are resting on his feet. 
To you all elements of your character and all incidents 
of your career are not only without material or sensible 
defect, but are almost equally worthy of approval. 
This unconscious self-appreciation, curiously enough, is 
not based on any conviction that joii have done, or are 
capable of doing, especially great things. You are not 
so dull as not fully so understand that it is not because 
of your achievements as a man, as a sheriff, as a mayor, 
or as a governor that you have been chosen to be presi- 
dent. You are well aware that you have attained no 
eminence in your profession, no distinction as a citizen 
and no unusual fame as a magistrate. There are, as 
you well know, many thousands who have done better 
w^hose names the brawling tongue of fame has never 
sounded in the public ear. There are millions whose 
personal merits are not less than yours who never 
dreamed of public commendation of theii* good works. 
In addition to this, you are well aware that in the per- 
petual competition Avhich our American life inspires 
there are not manj" who, under the circumstances sur- 



A MAN OF DESTINY. 25 

rounding yours, would have garnered from such oppor- 
tunity a Hghter harvest of good deeds, or have done less 
to awaken the respect and approval of good men. 

As a matter of ratiocination, you are well aware that 
in your political career you have been a pawn in the 
hands of stronger men — a piece accounted insignificant 
in itself, thrust forward just in the nick of time to 
check the triumphant progress of some stronger piece 
which might, indeed, have brushed you from the board, 
but in so doing must itself have met extinction. This 
fact, which would be gall and wormwood to some great 
natures, is rather pleasant and agreeable to you. It 
tends to confirm your imperturbable Islamic faith in 
destiny and strengthen your conviction that neither 
merit nor good works are at all essential elements in 
securing the highest earthly rewards. You count a 
willingness to undertake a task which a subtler mind 
would at once perceive to be impossible, a far more potent 
element of success in securing public approval than the 
power to boast of what has been achieved. Of this 
doctrine your own career affords, to your mind, irrefu- 
table evidence. With this consciousness of non-achieve- 
ment, there comes to you no conviction of demerit, nor 
even a suspicion that any unbiased mind might draw 
therefrom conclusions derogatory to yourself. The 
fact that any one does so is simply proof positive to 
you of a malevolent desire to do you wrong. You say 
to yourself, and say very truly no doubt, that you have 
never desired to do evil either in 3^our public or private 
capacity. If now and then your acts have resulted 
harmfully, 3^ou only urge in excuse for the same that, 



26 A MAN OF DESTINY. 

under the circumstances, you cM or meant to do the 
best you could. This explanation is sufficient for your- 
self, and you cannot imagine why it should not be 
sufficient for others. It is upon this foundation that 
you have builded up your sublime conviction in the 
public confidence in which you deem yourself impreg- 
nably intrenched. You believe that you will always 
be credited with good intentions, and that the blame 
for evil results will always be cast on others — your 
associates and co-workers, perhaps your subordinates — 
but never on yourself. 

This belief in your own destiny to be forever over- 
estimated by all mankind rests on such a substantial 
basis of self-approval that it is as impervious to ordi- 
nary assault as three feet of steel armor wdth ten feet 
of teak backing to the bullet of a toy pistol. Instead 
of being surprised or overwhelmed at public favor, 
you deem it altogether creditable to the intelligence of 
the public that it recognizes merits of which you are 
so profoundly assured. 

This self-appreciation is largely caused by your un- 
questioning behef in your phenomenal honesty. In 
the old days when you w^ere simply Grover Cleveland, 
a careless, eas3"-going attorney of no particular charac- 
ter, and noted only for the fact that there were no 
noticeable features about you except the self-complacent, 
happy-go-lucky w^ay in which you trundled your sleek 
corporosity along the path of life, you had no reputa- 
tion for exceptional integrity either among those with 
whom you co-operated in securing large bounties for 
brief enlistments, or those whom you met in the more 



A MAN OF DESTINY. 27 

private relations of life. Fortunately for you, you 
were introduced to public favor as an honest man. The 
philosopher who, lantern in hand, sought through the 
ranks of your party in Buffalo for that liisus naturce 
professed to have discovered in 3^our sleek and plastic 
features the indications of an integrity exceptional 
enough among your associates to justify your being 
heralded to the world as a candidate for wdiom honest 
men might vote. This was no doubt intended to be " a 
good enough Morgan until after election," and as a, 
fact was none too good even for that brief interval. 
Queerly enough, however, you began to believe what 
was said of you as a candidate, and after a time began 
to refer to yourself as an honest man. When this 
experience had been twice repeated, you had become 
thoroughly convinced that in this respect you were 
justly remarkable, and when at length you were wafted 
into the gubernatorial chair by a marvelous breeze of 
good fortune, and heard all men vaunting your honesty 
because nothing else could be said in your praise, you 
became thoroughly convinced that in this you were 
]ihenomenal. Subsequent events have tended to exalt 
this belief until you are fully satisfied that you not 
only are, but from the first have been the climacteric 
honest man of all the ages. This conviction does not 
tend to make your conscience quick and your hand 
eager to do good and righteous things, to punish evil 
and to unearth fraud, but simply to produce a feeling 
of self-complacent thankfulness that you are not as 
other men. Your self-love is thus securely based upon 
your honesty, which you have accepted as well-nigh 



28 A MAN OF DESTINY. 

unparalleled in history, on the testimony of the cam- 
paign-literature which has constituted your chief intel- 
lectual aliment since it concerned itself with your 
fortunes. 

Because of these essential idiosyncrasies, your op- 
ponents and critics have greatly misunderstood and 
misinterpreted certain of your acts. The fact that you 
never open your mouth in public without putting, not 
merely your foot, but your entire personality into it, 
does not arise from any weak or foolish vanit3\ You 
did not use the personal pronoun, pointing to yourself 
fifty-four times in a speech of half a column's length, 
because you love to talk about yourself, but simply be- 
cause you honestly supposed that it was of yourself 
that your auditors desired to hear. There were but 
two facts present to your consciousness during the de- 
livery of your speech : the one that you had been nom- 
inated for the presidency, and the other that the 
people were looking for you to tell them what sort of 
a president you would make. You did not dream that 
they desired you to speak of what are termed national 
issues — laws and measures that might promote the na- 
tional welfare. Were they not aware — had you not 
already assured them — that the olRce of president was 
purely an executive one, and was not that enough? 
What had you to do with national issues and 
political questions? They are for the consideration 
of the continental congress and the democratic party. 
It was enough, so far as such issues were concerned, 
that you should declare yourself in harmony with 
the party which had chosen you as its candidate, 



A MAN OF DESIINY. 29 

and that you had already done. You were a candidate 
for the presidency, and, if elected, your duty would be 
only to execute the laws — to appoint agents and select 
instruments, to make remoyals and sign appointments. 

It was what many would term a somewhat narrow 
and restricted yiew of tlie position you are destined to 
occupy. To you it had tlie merit of originality. The 
press ridiculed your solemn assertion that tlie office of 
president was an executiye one. To you it seemed a 
profound discoyery, and you belieyed that the people 
of the country so regarded it. With this yiew it be- 
came incumbent upon you to speak of yoursdlf ; to al- 
lude to your own peaceful and law-abiding character, 
and to assure your fellow-citizens that you would per- 
form the functions of this executiye office, no matter 
how unpleasant they might be, just as well as you 
might be able to do under the circumstances, and just 
as cheerfully as within the memory of your hearers 
you had performed the loathsome functions of a public 
executioner for which you had been chosen by their 
yotes. There are those, my dear sir, who regard 
with profound contempt both your oratorical and in- 
tellectual capacity, and point to this speech as con- 
clusiye eyidence of the correctness of their yiews. It 
is not only among your opponents, but with many of 
those who claim to stand with your friends, that such 
sentiments preyail. I know you too well to do you 
such injustice. 

As I stood amid the shouting throng, almost beneath 
the place from which you spoke, watched your counte- 
nance by the light of thousands of flaring torches as 



30 A MAN OF DESTINY. 

well as by the fitful glare of a hissing, spluttering carbon 
burner, as the gusts tossed the rain drops even in your 
face, I could not doubt your sincerity ; and considering 
afterward with careful analysis the speech you made, 
I felt constrained to admit that, from 3^our standpoint, 
it was a masterly production, rising at some points to 
a sort of crude, pathetic eloquence. The peculiarities 
of the speech and the man were the same. The 
idiosyncrasies of both were fundamental. You thought 
that all those anxious faces were looking up into yours 
to inquire whether 3^ou would work hard, appoint the 
best men you could, all things considered, and try your 
very best to do the least you could besides, even if you 
had to sit up until twelve o'clock six nights in the week 
to accomplish the task. Tested by this rule it will be 
seen that your speech at Buffalo is entitled to be counted 
among the great oratorical efforts of the men whom 
destiny has chosen for her favorites in all ages of the 
world. It contained many platitudes, it is true, but it 
fitted the occasion, harmonized with your view of the 
surroundings, and was a true and genuine portraiture 
of the man who uttered it. As a measure of your 
mind, an exponent of your manhood, and a key to 
your idea of statesmanship and patriotism, it left noth- 
ing to be desired. 

On such a nature the indirect appeal is of necessity 
wasted. Whatever I desire to say to you I am well 
aware must be adjusted to your peculiar nature. It is 
impossible to reach you through others. The joys and 
sorrows, hopes and fears, of individual or segregated 
humanity are nothing in the world to you. You are 



A MAN OF DESTINY. 31 

not cruel. You do not mean to be hard-hearted, but 
the tale of suffering annoys. You do not feel respon- 
sible for existent evil, and a simple executive officer 
cannot properly be held accountable for prospective 
good. The world's woe is no good reason for disturb- 
ing your serenity of mind. There is nothing of the 
martyr, and no trace of the eager reformer, in your 
nature. You wish the world well and love to see the 
country prosper, but if the world will get awry and 
the country perversely refuses to prosper, you feel that 
the blame cannot be laid at your door nor you be prop- 
erly required to readjust the conditions of national 
life. It is only as the general welfare or individual 
need is shown to bear upon your personal ease or 
interest that appeal to 3^ou may be made effective. 
Once convinced of the need of effort to secure this, and 
one may be certain of your co-operation. Unhke many 
great natures, yours can be approached only from 
within. 

When Alexander asked Diogenes what he desired, 
it is not likel}^ that he was moved by any special im- 
pulse to relieve his Avants or give happiness to the 
philosopher. His only motive was to gratify himself 
by a display of power. He had never once observed 
that he was standing in the poor man's sunshine and 
taking from him the one enjoyable thing he already 
had. You are not like Alexander. You would prob- 
ably never have gone out of your way to visit a man 
who lived in a tub at all. Even if you had casually 
passed his ambulatory residence you would not have 
been likely to have inquired as to his Avants or to have 



32 A MAN OF DESTINY. 

intimated your willingness to supply them. If, how- 
ever, you had stopped to gaze at him and had been re- 
quested to get out of his sunlight, you would have 
been greatly annoyed and considered him as he no 
doubt was, an unmannerly and troublesome cur. Nev- 
ertheless you would have moved on, and would have 
done so all tlie more readily if the sunshine had been 
just as warm upon your own back elsewhere as if 
standing before his tub. How these characteristics 
will serve you in the discharge of the duties of the 
exalted position you are soon to fill the world waits 
anxiously to see. Sia^a. 

New York, December 16. 



1^0. III. 

^^JSTAY, MY GOOD FKIE:N'D." 
♦ 
To Groyer Cleveland, President-Elect: 

My Dear Sh% — One of those journalists, whom the 
accident of political faith requires as yet to exercise 
peculiar vigilance in detecting every manifestation of 
disfavor manifested toward the representative of his 
party now about to assume the direction of national 
affairs for the first time during the memory of more 
than one-half of its voters, in commenting upon my 
former letters, after a careful analysis of their charac- 
teristics, solemnly declares his profound conviction 
that " It does not admit of doubt that the writer, what- 
ever his professions may be, is not a friend of Gover- 
nor Cleveland, though it is just possible that the letters 
may be the production of one or more persons who at 
one time held somewhat close relations with the pres- 
ident-elect, though now, for reasons that will appear 
in due time, personally antagonistic to him and anx- 
ious to embarrass and impair the success of his admin- 
istration." 

The term "friend" is of such plastic insignificance 
that the writer no doubt thought himself entirely se- 
cure in this carefully guarded statement. I suppose he 
would term himself your friend, yet in penning this 
very paragraph it is quite possible he has shown him- 
self an enemy. He has evidently mistaken a calm, 
3 33 



34 A MAN OF DESTINY. 

dispassionate analysis of your character and capacity 
for an act of malice and ill-will. A moment's thought 
would have shown him the absurdity of this hypothesis. 
So far as personal animosity is concerned, the most 
earless reader ought at once to perceive that it is a moral 
impossibility for the writer of these letters to entertain 
any feeling approaching to hostility toward a man of 
the mental caliber and moral characteristics of Stephen 
Grover Cleveland. 

By the way, my dear sir, let me pause here to remind 
you of a duty Avhich you owe to yourself, your party 
associates, the historian of the future, and — I like to 
have said to your posterity, Avhich would have been 
peculiarly absurd since it would seem that they really 
have less interest in the matter than almost anybody 
else. The duty to which I would call your attention 
as a fitting task to occupy your mind during the 
intervals of cabinet-making, is that of ascertaining and 
authoritatively promulgati ng your real name. It is said 
that your baptismal name is that given above, but that 
the name of the primal Christian martyr was somehow 
lost upon your journey from obscurity to fame. You 
were nominated as Grover Cleveland because even 
" Cardinal " Manning, who had been your trusted con- 
fessor and sole spiritual adviser since the hour of your 
political birth, had never heard that there was even a 
tradition of any other, l^o doubt the fact has quite 
escaped your own memory, even if it was ever a part of 
your consciousness. It is not yet known exactly by 
what name you were designated by the members of the 
several electoral colleges by whom you were finally 



A MAN^ OF DESTINY. 35 

chosen to that dignity which waits upon your des- 
tiny. 

It is quite possible that when the seals come to be 
opened it may be found that Georgia, in her anxiety 
to perpetuate the ecstacy which allowed Mr. O' Grady, 
the editor, to adjourn her legislature without the form 
of a motion, in honor of your election, may have cast 
her vote for Stephen Grover. Connecticut may have 
parted the name in what a younger man might style 
dude-fashion, in the middle, and thrown her ballots for 
S. Grover, while the exultant democracy of New York 
may have displayed the exhilaration which always at- 
tends their success, by designating their favorite by 
the one name which lives in their memories as the only 
synonym of good luck in a quarter of a century, simple 
" Grover," forgetting to make any allusion to the saint 
who was stoned so soon after his election. Even if 
this should be the case it would be entirely immaterial. 
The party which opposed your election is one that 
never takes advantage of a technicality, and fortu- 
nately for you the fame attaching to the name, whether 
spelled out in full or however abbreviated, is not such 
as any man is likely to covet for himself. It would 
seem, however, especially desirable that you should at 
least be inaugurated under j^our proper cognomen, if it 
really is discoverable. Surely you would not leave 
any such riddle for the future to solve as the ascertain- 
ment of the birthplace of your great exemplar, Andrew 
Jackson — a man whom it is impossible that you should 
ever rival in courage, constanc}^, or patriotic achieve- 
ment, but whom you may even excel in the value of 



36 A MAN OF DESTINY. 

the spoils you expect to distribute among "a hungry 
horde " of followers whose hearts have long been sick- 
ened by the hopeless tedium of unpromising delay. 

To return, however, to the imputation which your 
over-zealous follower cast upon me, that I am. not your 
friend. If by friendship he means that close and tender 
relation w^hich subsists between two who have taken 
down the door of conventional restraint and only 
hung the portiere of informal separation between their 
hearts — have given each other carte blanche to come 
and go without the countersign of request and permis- 
sion — have bestowed upon each other the pass-key of 
unreserved confidence, with no bitterer feeling than 
mere regret that the treasure- vault of confidence con- 
tained nothing worthy of the faithful heart to whose 
use and behoof its barrenness was freely profi"ered— if 
this be the significance which he attaches to the idea of 
friendship, or any reciprocal relation of the same char- 
acter varying only in degree, then indeed it is true that 
I am not, never have been, and never can be, your 
friend. Friendship of this sort is a mutual relation. 
It is a yoke that never presses the neck of one and 
leaves his fellow's all unchafed. It is a bond which 
two at least must underwrite, and the conditions of 
which are binding alike upon both joint obligors. 

Such friendship cannot coexist with servitude. It 
may overleap all social distinctions ; it may bid defiance 
to the barriers of race and caste ; it may unite in bonds 
more durable than brass the extremes of human life ; 
the rich and the poor, the high and the low, the bond 
and the free may be linked together by this frailest, 



A MAN OF DESTINY. 37 

noblest, strongest tie ; but before friendship can unite 
such extremes, the gulf of separation must be spanned 
by self-forgetfulness, and they must meet upon the 
level of sympathy, esteem and mutual obligation. 
Friendship admits of no disparity of favor. A mon- 
arch may demand allegiance, or a master exact service. 
A king may require a subject's life without thought of 
recompense ; a master may take the labor of his slave 
without tender of thanks ; but in the realm of friendship 
there is no base coin. The image and superscription of 
mutual devotion alone is current there. A tear may 
overbalance the life of a friend, but the man who will 
not shed the tear, who will not pay the price, can never 
have the friend. From this realm of self-forgetful 
consecration to another's welfare you are by natural 
conformation forever excluded. Followers you may 
have, and servitors, but friends are rigorously forbidden 
to one who will not pay the entrance-fee of self-renun- 
ciation, which alone can admit to that garden of the 
gods — the heart of a true friend. 

Some might, no doubt, count this fact a sad mis- 
fortune, but I doubt if you have ever so regarded it. 
There may have been times when you have earnestly 
desired that you might enjoy this boon. You are by 
no means a hard, stern, or self-centered man. You not 
only desire but expect the good will and ready service of 
others. For such service you are ready to give an 
equivalent, provided always that such equivalent does 
not require self-sacrifice or exertion on your part, or 
subject'your equanimity to annoying disturbance. As 
long as you can repay devotion without inconvenience 



38 A MAN OF DESTINY. 

or discomfort to yourself you are most lavish in recom- 
pensing effort in your behalf. To the man who 
ministers to your success you are willing to give the 
half of your kingdom, provided it is that half which 
you do not require for your own comfort or enjoyment. 
You are not a man of unbounded ambition or insatiable 
greed. You do not desire to possess the whole earth, 
and would never think of weeping for more worlds to 
conquer. You only care for wealth or position so far 
as they may minister to your enjoyment. Whatever 
surplus there may be of either you are willing to 
distribute to others, share and share alike, according to 
their respective merits as contributory elements of your 
success. 

As soon as the most unbounded devotion to your 
interests seems to demand an atom of personal sacrifice 
at your hands this inclination vanishes. As a con- 
sideration for favors yet to be performed you are some- 
times willing to engage to suffer personal discomfort, 
but why you should be expected to face even the least 
annoyance as a reward for past devotion, or a recom- 
pense for services already rendered, you have never yet 
been able to understand. In the ordinarv sense of the 
term, vou are not a selfish nor a greedy man. Your 
selfishness is more phenomenal in its quality than its 
extent. You do not wish to monopolize all the good 
things of the world. You do not envy other men what 
they enjoy. It is only when another's happiness con- 
flicts with your comfort that one learns the complete- 
ness of your apotheosis of self. If without incon- 
venience or discomfort you could relieve the woes of 



A M7LN OF DESTINY. 39 

all mankind, I verily believe the world would have no 
further need of tears, but you would never dream of 
lessening your enjoyment or assuming any burden of 
discomfort, even if you might thereby vicariously cure 
all the world's miseries. This peculiar phase of self- 
indulgence is in strict harmony with the phenomenal 
character of your self-regard. It seems to you only 
natural and reasonable that an hour's discomfort to 
yourself should outweigh another's lifetime of devotion. 
It is not that you love others less, but yourself more. 
Perhaps it is well that your saint's name has been 
forgotten, there is so little of the martyr-spirit in your 
make-up. 

Your regard for the rest of mankind is based solely 
upon their relations to yourself — your comfort, success 
and convenience. If others are able and willing to 
advance your interests or enhance your enjoyment 
your feeling toward them is sure to be both kindly 
and sincere. Whenever this ability or Avillingness is at 
an end, you become at once oblivious to their existence. 
You are rightly denominated an amiable man. You 
never indulge in hostility or revenge. Such sentiments 
are not only too active and positive to comport with 
your character, but they imply discomfort and annoy- 
ance. You are very kind in that you never seek to 
punish those who have ceased to serve. You only forget 
them. The staff on Avhich you leaned yesterday, rude 
but strong perhaps, and which for a long time proved 
true and serviceable, is without regret condemned to 
the oblivion of the garret as soon as a more costly and 
elegant support is found ready for your hand. 



40 A MAN OF DESTINY. 

It is not your fault that you have never known the 
sentiment of friendship. You are so absorbed in compla- 
cent contemplation of yourself and in meditation upon 
that destiny whose favorite child you deem yourself to 
be, that you have no opportunity for considering the 
happiness or interests of others. Your appreciation of 
your own personal merit is so overwhelming and ab- 
sorbing that no sense of another's desert can reach 
your consciousness. You are quite unable to project 
yourself into another's life even for a moment and 
really become aware of others' happiness or woe only 
as it is reflected in the placid mirror of your own en- 
joyment. You are glad to have men devoted to your 
interests, and are by no means unwilling to admit the 
fact of such devotion, but you are quite unable to real- 
ize that such devotion requires any reciprocal exertion 
on your part.- Indeed it is a matter of surprise to you 
that any one should fail in such reasonable tribute to 
your evidently exalted destiny. Counting it a matter 
of course, you recognize no obligation created by it, 
and feel intensely annoyed if any one presumes to ex- 
pect reciprocity of good will and good deeds. While 
you received as a matter of course the exertions of the 
leading men of your party throughout the country in 
your behalf during the recent struggle, it was well 
known that in case another had been nominated you 
would not have considered it incumbent upon yourself 
to have lifted so much as a little finger to secure his 
election. This course would not have been prompted 
by any feeling of envy or jealousy on your part, but 
simply from inability to perceive that the past favor 



A MAN OF DESTINY. 41 

of the party implied any obligation on your part to 
labor for its success when you happened not to be its 
candidate. You have always been known and recog- 
nized as a member of the democratic party, yet, ex- 
cept when your own interests as a candidate were inex- 
tricably joined with the success of the party, you have 
never been known to be of any more service to that 
organization than you were to the nation in her hour 
of peril. 

The fact that you haVe been utterly oblivious to the 
sentiment of friendship and have never known or rec- 
ognized any of the obligations which ordinary hu- 
manity regards it as imposing upon them, has unques- 
tionably been of great advantage to you heretofore 
and may prove especially valuable in the new career 
which is opening before you. The power to lay aside 
without regret an instrument or association which can 
no longer prove advantageous is much more rare than 
men generally suppose, and the fact that you possess it 
in such a high degree is another evidence of peculiar 
fitness for the place to which you have been chosen, 
and must very strongly tend to confirm your faith in 
the exalted destiny which you believe awaits you as 
the successor in opportunity of Andrew Jackson and 
the only really honest man who has occupied the presi- 
dential chair since the husband of "the rich w^dow 
Custis " left eight hundred thousand dollars to his ex- 
ecutors, and died without lawful issue. 

No man can boast your friendship and no woman 
claim your love. There is no bias of affection to in- 



42 A MxiN OF DESTINY. 

terfere with the faithful performance of the duties of 
your official position in regard to which you have for- 
mulated the startingly original proposition that it con- 
stitutes a '' public trust." So long as you remained in 
a private position it was hardly to be counted to jouv 
credit that you never had a friend ; but now that you 
are about to become the official head of the nation 
during the next quadrenniate, one sees how well it is 
that you should be invulnerable ahke to the solicita- 
tions of friendship and the blandishments of love. 

How many noble lives have been wrecked through 
such tender yet mahgn influences ! How many great 
men have been brought to the level of the lowest 
through the undue influence of unworthy but unsus- 
pected friends ! How many of the bravest and bright- 
est of earth has not the love of woman destroyed! 
The capital of the nation, which you are about to visit 
for the second time in your life, in order to become its 
official head, is a Avhited sepulchre, full of the bones of 
those who have fallen from the heights of power be- 
cause they have listened to the voice of friendship or 
the song of love. Its very air is thick with terrible 
tales of Aveakness, shame and crime. You will hear 
them all during that quadrennial term whose profitable 
years will add not a little to the hoard you have 
hitherto so carefully hidden from the tax-gatherer's 
ken. You will learn how even the mightiest have 
fallen and the wisest have erred, until you may perhaps 
be glad that you bring into this pitfall, Avhere wisdom 
and virtue are so oft imperiled and betrayed, no hard- 



A MAN OF DKSTINY. 4B 

won fame of which von are hkelyto suffer loss. They 
will tell you of a marvelous arra}^ of great, and wise, 
and eloquent men, Avhom the cunning- and beautiful 
Delilahs of the capital l^ive shorn of their strength, 
so that side by side with their history runs the unwrit- 
ten tradition of their shame. You will perhaps hear 
the sacred name of Washington coupled with one who 
received preferment at his hands, and Avhose features 
were afterward used to quicken the fancy and (Hrect 
the pencil of him who has preserved for our edification 
the grave, stern lineaments of the Father of his Coun- 
try. You will learn that almost every house is associ- 
ated with some tale that casts a blemish on some great 
name. Here a husband's honor was avenged ; there 
dwelt a wife whose guilt brought shame and ruin to a 
happy home. Yonder stood a hostel in which used to 
dwell a senator hardly less famous for his elo(|uence 
than infamous for his vices, and unmatched in both. 
Upon this corner you will be told the story of a deli- 
caie woman who assailed her gray-haired and seemingly 
saintly seducer on his way to his place in the capitol. 
Here dwelt one who betrayed the confidence of a great 
soldier and brought sliame upon his trustful friend. In 
yonder house a siren lived whose favors are said to 
have constituted a husband's stepping-stones to power 
under one of your predecessors. 

Saving a few — ah, so very few of the great names 
of the past — you will find that love or friendship un- 
worthily bestowed have dragged into the mire of 
ill-repute a vast number of the strongest and noblest. 



44 A MAN OF DESTINY. 

Hearing these sad tales it will no doubt occur to you as 
an exceedingly fortunate thing for a man of destiny to 
be without entangling alliances. The associations of the 
sheriff's office and the mayor's court might be unpleas- 
ant spectres to confront a president, but fortunately 
for you in your whole life no man has had any good 
reason to believe that you were his friend, nor any 
woman reasonable ground to suppose that you regarded 
her with more than evanescent warmth. In this fact 
no doubt lies not a little of your prestige, and to this 
you owe your strongest chances for success. Ko ancient 
friendship is likely to bias your judgment witii the tale 
of former faithfulness nor unforgotten love to soothe 
your vigilance to slumber with the ecstatic strains of 
an " Auld lang syne " " pulsing with passion's quaver." 
In the prime of life you will come to the headship 
of the nation untrammeled with any past entangle- 
ments. You have no friends to reward nor enemies to 
punish, but only yourself — your own ease and interests 
to serve. Perhaps Mr. Manning will expect to be not 
only the chaplain of the household but the primate of 
the realm, but it is more than probable that he under- 
stands too well the peculiarities of your temper to risk 
a place in your kitchen-cabinet, and that he will content 
himself with the spoils you will leave behind in the 
state rather than engage in the dubious task of assist- 
ing you in harmonizing the irreconcilable forces which 
joined to make you president, thereby transforming 
that belief in favoring fortune which your surroundings 
and associations impelled you theretofore to denominate 



A MAN OF DESTINY. 45 

"luck" into an unquestioning faith that the destiny 
which overrides all human wisdom has chosen you as 
the most notable 

" Of errant saints, whom all men grant 
To be tlie true church militant." 

New York, December 24. blVA. 



-No. TV. 

^'SILEIS^CE A:^rD DARKNESS — SOLEMJN" 
SISTERS." 

To Geover Cleveland, President Elect : 

My Dear Sir, — It is an important element of that 
good fortune which you are so fond of denominating 
destiny, that your presidential fate and fame are the 
long-deferred inheritance of the democratic party, not 
only because your estate may thereby be greatly en- 
hanced through the beneficence of a testator who is said 
to have left a quarter of a million to the unknown lega- 
tee who should first bring it success, but also because 
of the composition and characteristics of the party 
itself. It is not without reason that such terms as 
'' unterrified," " bourbon," " unwashed,'' and other 
names signifying unyielding tenacity of purpose, untir- 
ing zeal, and unquenchable courage, are applied to the 
democratic party. No man who at all appreciates 
practical power can refrain from feeling an intense 
admiration for the prime attributes of the party whose 
nominal headship you have accidentally received. It 
is the one unchangeable feature in the realm of Ameri- 
can politics. It is the Old Guard of our recent political 
history, differing in its characteristics from the subject 
of Cambronne's famous aphorism only in its absolute 
indestructibility. The den^ocracy never dies, never 
surrenders, never willingly abandons the past or steps 

46 



A MAN OF DESTINY. 47 

forward to meet the future. The unbroken level of 
immutable identity remains from year to year, from 
one quadrenniate of power or prostration to another. 
A democrat of the " forties " would find himself entirely 
at home with his brethren of the "eighiies" though he 
had spent the intervening years in the dreamy confines 
of Sleepy Hollow. A quarter of a century more fecund 
in marvels than any cycle of the past has not sufficed 
to change any of its essential attributes. Superficially, 
it may wear a different aspect. Here and there a new 
name and an unknown face, like your own, may appear 
upon the surface, but 

" The deepest ice which ever froze, 
Can only o'er the surface close; 
The living stream lies quick below, 
And flows and cannot cease to flow." 

Even the overthrow of all its pet theories by the 
relentless logic of events has not served to modify, to 
any appreciable extent, its character or to change its 
identity. The failure of the fugitive slave law, its 
most cherished measure for the su^^pression of liberty 
and the perpetuation of its owm powder ; the ill-sucCess 
attending the repeal of the Missouri compromise; the 
overthrow of the doctrine that the nation may not 
coerce a sovereign state ; the inability of the confed- 
eracy to make good the boast of a superior strength ; 
the futility of all efforts to embarrass the government 
in the task of suppressing rebellion ; the misfortune of 
Appomatox, which disproved its express declaration 
that the w^ar was a failure ; the fact that two hundred 
thousand colored men were allowed to nourish the tree 



48 A MAN OF DESTINY. 

of liberty with the blood of a race condemned by 
democratic dogma to eternal servitude ; the crumb- 
ling into dust of that distinctive democratic principle 
which constituted the corner-stone of the confederacy ; 
the emancipation of the slave and his elevation to the 
rank of the citizen ; the increased production of south- 
ern staples resulting from free labor ; the fact that the 
national debt has not only been held sacred, but the 
national credit placed higher than that of any other 
nation — the fact that all these and many other unto- 
ward happenings, regarded from a democratic stand- 
point, have not suiSced to elicit a blush of shame or a 
word of apology or regret, may well be accepted as 
proving bej^ond all question that the democratic party 
is the one indestructible, unchangeable, earthly essence. 
In addition to its immutability, the democratic 
party is distinguished also by its sublime capacity of 
forgetfulness. Like truth, it ma}^ be fitly claimed for 
democracy that " the eternal years of God are hers," 
since the memory of what it has been is always over- 
laid with the deceptive promise of what it hopes to be, 
and the shadow of what it has not done concealed by 
the glaring boast of what it would have done. While 
it may not always have perceived the truth, it has 
never found it necessary to acknowledge error. Its 
principles may become defunct, but it never gives them 
public burial. If it is guilty of any evil-doing it never 
proclaims its malfeasance from the housetop. If its 
leaders become infamous through crime or treason, it 
never joins in their denunciation. Jeff Davis and the 
famous foreman of " Big Six " are still sacred names in 



A MAN OF DESTINY. 49 

the saintly calendar of democracy. Its dead are never 
buried. If its record becomes too odoriferous for 
farther transportation it is simply dropped by the way- 
side while the party sheers silently off to the wind- 
Avard, trusting with good reason to time and silence to 
entomb its shame. It erects no headstones to mark 
the resting-place of defunct aspirations. For it the 
past hides only actual or potential good. From the 
day when a democratic president extended the egis of 
national power over the threatened head of Swartwout, 
until a presidential candidate offered sanctuary in ob- 
livion and delay to your faithful right-hand supporter, 
" 999 " Thompson, there has never been found a 
democrat who was in favor of turning the light on 
democratic malfeasance, except so far as might be 
necessary to enhance his own prospects or increase his 
individual dividend of public plunder. It is even be- 
lieved that if Tweed had not been too stiff-necked and 
thick-headed to bow the knee in season to the mighty 
pigmy of Gramercy Park, the " Whisperer of Cipher 
Alley " would never have taken the trouble to reveal 
those pretended analyses of evil deeds which were in 
fact only the resentful revelations of disappointed 
accomplices. 

The democratic party never wears sackcloth nor 
confesses shame. It never thrusts its lepers without 
the camp nor stones its Achans. If they grow too bold, 
or the contagion of their lives becomes too apparent, 
it simply sends them to the rear and puts between 
them and a curious world clean, white men of straw 
like yourself, who do their bidding while they serve to 



50 A MAN OF DESTINY. 

screen the baneful past. By this means desertions are 
mostly avoided, and not only are ''the ninety and nine" 
still safely kept " in the shelter of the fold," but there is 
" ample scope and verge enough " for such men as that 
greatest and boldest of municipal j)irates who robs in 
undisturbed serenity on the island of Manhattan under 
the protection of that mystic democratic cabalism 
" 999." 

J^othing more clearly attests your especial fitness for 
the exalted destmy of chief of the "hungry hordes" 
that hope soon to prey with their faces set like a flint 
toward the white altar on the Capitoline hill, than the 
tender delicacy with which you followed the example 
of the sons of Koah and refused to look upon the 
shame of one whose procreant power had brought 3^ou 
out of nothingness to fame, and while '' Thamis thou 
wert and Cawdor," had proclaimed that more exalted 
destiny that is about to be fulfilled by your corporeal 
occupancy of the presidential chair and the enjoyment 
of a salary of fifty thousand dollars a year. In all his- 
tory there is nothing more touching than the tearful 
alacrity with which you turned aAvay your face and 
held your nose, lest any sense should bring to your con- 
sciousness the fact that the foul and festering nakedness 
of your " guide, philosopher, and friend " was exposed 
to the sacrilegious jeers of that unofficial Canaan which 
was born only to be damned. How tenderly and rever- 
ently, with a face suffused with ingenuous blushes, by 
and with the advice and consent of Mr. Manning, you 
moved backward and spread the white, impervious gar- 
ment of official delay over the unseemly spectacle. 



A MAN OF DESTINY. 61 

From that hour there was never a doubt of jour wor- 
thiness to stand in the shoes which Jackson wore and 
Van Buren inherited ; in which Polk was hidden away, 
and with which Buchanan endeavored to conceal the 
gouty members on which an infirm patriotism sought 
to stand. 

In addition to'these notable qualities the democratic 
party is very justly distinguished for its remarkable 
power of assimilation and the utilization of apparently 
irreconcilable elements. You are no doubt vaguely 
aware of this characteristic of your party. It is im- 
possible that one should have worshiped, it matters 
not how drowsily, the two patron saints of our modern 
democracy, Jackson and Calhoun, without being 
struck by the flexibility of an organization which can- 
onizes such antipodal natures and renders to each of 
the mutually destructive ideas that animated them an 
equal meed of praise. This seeming miracle, however, 
is as nothing to the one that has been performed in 
our day, and which may result in handing your name 
down to posterity as that of the third person in the 
democratic trinity. Such a combination would fulfill 
the prime condition of the mighty Brahman trio — a 
union of two positive, contrasted, and mutually de- 
structive elements with one neo:ative, unresistino- and 
indestructible neuter which serves as an eternal buffer 
against which the others beat in ceaseless activity yet 
without perceptible effect. 

You are, of course, aware that the nucleus on which 
your party is formed consists of three distinct elements. 
First among these, both in number, character, and es- 



52 A MAN OF DESTINY. 

sential manhood, are the ex-confederate, kukhix, red 
shirt, bulldozing, fraud-protecting bourbons of the 
south. The courage, numbers, and genius for govern- 
ment which they possess serve the same purpose for 
the democratic party that chopped meat performs for 
a sausage. They give it form, consistency, and flavor. 
With them is intermixed that spicy remnant of malig- 
nant copperheadism which is so well r,epresented by 
the man who would be your successor iJ' by any mishap 
you should have the good fortune to be translated 
from the sphere of duty on which you are about to en- 
ter before you had drawn the stipend attaching to a 
full term. The other basic element is that mass of neu- 
tral natures like your own, whose inclination is to do 
nothing that can be left undone. That confederates 
and copperheads should harmonize is of course as nat- 
ural as confraternity between the thief and the re- 
ceiver of unlawful plunder. An antipathy to danger 
or exertion and a constitutional inability to apprehend 
the wants and woes of others naturally incline the 
other class to this combination. 

Thus far the development was normal and the result 
homogeneous. From that point it begins to take on 
that marvelous character which culminates in your 
election. How " mugwumps," whose lily fingers were 
soiled by the very thought of human imperfection, 
were brought to clasp the hands of those who had 
bathed the ballot-box in gore and join with them in 
" painting the town red " over a victory based on mur- 
der and perpetuated by unblushing and undeniable 
fraud ; how the " civil-service reformers " could be 



A MAN OF DESTINY. 53 

brought to co-operate with a party to which political 
plunder has always been as the breath of its nostrils ; 
how the prohibitionists and rum-sellers could be in- 
duced to fall upon each others' necks and weep in mut- 
ual ecstacy over the downfall of the only party which 
had ever attempted to mitigate the evils of intemper- 
ance by wholesome legislation ; how men, upon whose 
heads had been set a price for having favored the 
emancipation of the slave, could be persuaded to unite 
with boastful and arrogant oppressors of the freed- 
man ; how those whose wounds, received in self -forget- 
ful exemplification of the prayer, "As He died to make 
men holy, let us die to make men free,'' could not only 
be dragooned into co-operation with rebels who still 
boast of their unrepentant state, but also be wheedled 
into elevating into power men who stabbed them in 
the back while they fought for liberty — that these men 
and the sons of such men should put the past under 
their feet, trample on all that was honorable and 
worthy in their own lives and simply merge their po- 
litical existence with the basis-mass of treasonable and 
fraudulent conglomerate which forms the nucleus of 
your party — all this constitutes a miracle the mystery 
of Avhich no man can fathom. 

This power of assimilation, which resides in the 
maw of democracy, is not only peculiar to it as a 
party, but has been a most important and essential 
element of its success. The party picked up all the 
stragglers from the enemy's columns, and by some 
strange magic induced them to serve in its own ranks 
without bounty or preferment. 'Nay, it went into the 



54 A MAN OF DESTINY. 

very camp of its foes, blinded many of their subordi- 
nate leaders with the glare of a vain ambition, and led 
them away like the bound and blinded Samson to 
grind amid jeers and scoffs at the democratic mill. It 
seduced poor Horace Greeley from the two ideas on 
which his fame Avas based to take the leadership of the 
united hosts of treason and free trade It flaunted the 
red flag of revenge before the angry eyes of Sumner, 
and led him to sully the last hours of a glorious career 
by subordinating public interests to personal malice. 
It took a war governor of a great state, who was so 
proud of the heritage of fame, which he had won in 
the hour of the nation's crucial agony, that he would 
condescend to serve his party in no ])osition less honor- 
able than that of senator, and made him content to 
occupy by sufferance merely the position of its puppet 
and apologist in the house of representatives. It 
took men who had won immortal honors in the fore- 
front of battle in behalf of liberty, and blinding them 
by the mere promise of favor made them the most 
virulent assailants of their comrades in arms, and when 
the luster of tlie stars they had won was forever 
dimmed, thrust them into the ranks of its myrmidons 
and compelled them to drag onward its triumphal car 
and assist in elevating to s^ts of power men whose 
hearts had never throbl^ed with the sentiment of patri- 
otism nor felt the tender thrill that comes responsive 
to oppressed humanity's appeal for right. 

Amid all the exigencies of the past, however, this 
party has never once abandoned or betra^^ed its own. 
]^o sin of omission or commission has been sufficient 



A MAN OF DESTINY, 55 

to incur the penalty of excommunication whenever 
such sin has been atoned by confession and submission. 
It has never been guilty of dividing the heritage of 
Israel with strangers or bestowing on unbelieving 
dogs anything more satisfying than the crumbs of 
promise, no matter how well they had served in drag- 
ging down its prey. 

In but one instance, perhaps, has this party failed to 
reduce to the dead level of indistinguishable subservi- 
ency and inextricable submission the recreant repub- 
lican, that multifariously endowed " favorite son," 
whom German revolution cast upon our shores, loaded 
to the muzzle with good advice, and ready and willing 
to wear himself to a shadow with polyglottic denunci- 
ation of all doubters of his infallibility — this man, the 
honor of whose citizenship some half-dozen common- 
wealths contend that they ought not to be compelled 
to bear — Mr. Carl Shurz, has thus far proved himself 
invincible to its wiles, even while performing its be- 
hests. This fact is not supposed to be due to ineradi- 
cable opposition on his part to any change of allegiance 
or renunciation of doctrine, but chiefly to that fine 
business instinct which leads him to prefer a moderate 
reward which is of a kind that materializes in the gross 
and suderific present tc the most dazzling promises 
which the most lavish democratic fancy has yet been en- 
abled to paint upon the canvas of the future. On more 
than one occasion his fecund brain, ever-ready tongue, 
and venomdaden pen, together with his self-declared 
leadership and proprietary right to dispose of "the 
German contingent," has rendered him a seemingly 



56 A MAN OF DESTINY. 

valuable ally in a doubtful conflict. In all such ne- 
gotiations heretofore, he is believed to have held 
"a full hand" against the "bob-tailed flush" in the 
possession of the democracy. The recent unexpected 
victory of that party would seem, however, to have 
left him a little behind. He comes promptly to the 
front and reminds the party that he had a weapon 
in his hands which even an organization so invulnera- 
ble to harmful assault may well dread to encounter — 
his advice. It were better to fight side by side with a 
blind man wielding a Damascus blade, than be required 
to back this Dugald Dalgetty of our politics, sent, it 
would seem, to avenge the slight our history has put 
upon the Hessian allies of King George, when the 
broad sword of monition whistles round his head and 
the rao-e that is born of wasted wisdom steels his arm. 
Whether the democratic party will succeed in sitting 
down on this Boanerges of the Ehine or not is an un- 
determined problem. There are those who believe the 
story of Hans Breitmann's capture was an inspired 
vision prefigurant of the present relations between 
Carl Schurz and the democracy : 

"Dey shtripped off his goat and skyugled his poots, 

Dey dressed him mit rags of a repel recruits; 
But one gray-haired old veller smiled grimly and bet 

Dot Breitmann vouldt pe a pad egg for dem yet. 
He has more on his pipe as dem vellers allows; 

He has cardts yet in hand und das spiel ist nicht aus 
Dey'llfind dat dey took in der teufel to board, 

De day dey pooled Breitmann well ofer deford" 

However this may be, he has already made public 
proffer to you of his advice. The follower whose unjust 



A MAN OF DESTINY. 57 

accusation determined the tenor of my last letter by 
accusing me of unfriendliness to you little knows my 
admiration for a man who plays his hand, not only for 
all it is worth, but for a thousand times more than the 
most hopeful observer would ever appraise it. You 
have done this hitherto with the most exquisite skill 
of any man whose name is j^i'eserved in the world's 
history. Thus far no man has drawn so big a prize in 
the lottery of life upon so small an investment of 
achievement, power, or love as yourself. IS'o man 
desires more sincerely than I to see you play out this 
hand to the very last card with like success. I am 
afraid you will not be able to do it. I see the pitfalls 
and the perils that beset your path, and do not believe 
that luck ever loaded any man so as to enable him to 
fall right side up on the softest thing in sight every 
time during a long series of years. All authorities 
agree that luck runs in streaks. Your streak has been 
a marvelously mde and unprecedentedly rich one. 
Even now the chances seem wondrously in your favor. 
With such a party as the democracy behind you, and 
bound to you with that gratitude which always attends 
a full meal after a fast so long that the memory of 
many of them '4'unneth not to the contrary," you 
should be able to cap the climax of the world's suc- 
cesses. I most devoutly trust that you may. Such 
success upon your part would wipe out a thousand 
limitations which the past has cast around young lives. 
It would enlarge the area of possibilit}^ ; extend the 
field of competition ; provide a new definition of free 
government, and furnish a tremendous argument 



58 A MAN OF DESTINY. 

against the doctrine of an intelligent fate. It would 
show, also, what the countn^ could do in developing 
sterile fields and overturning established theories. 
As an American I am anxious, therefore, for your 
success. I would like to see you keep the democratic 
party at your back and trump every trick they 
may play for the extinction of the almost impercept- 
ible individuality which yet remains to you. I have 
shown you how faithfully the party sticks to its OAvn 
" through evil as well as good report." You have your- 
self demonstrated how closer than a child that nestles 
in a mother's bosom it chngs to the bringer of good 
luck and the dispenser of patronage. If you can only 
keep them on "the ragged edge" of such expectancy 
the future holds nothing that you need fear. Yet I 
can but tremble for you. Schurz has proffered his ad- 
vice ! Oh, my dear sir, beware ! The shirt of Xessus — 
nay, all the shirts that Nessus ever had — were not to 
be compared to the danger that clings to this. jN'o 
president-elect ever listened to his voice and escaped 
the deep damnation of irretrievable failure. German 
unity was found impossible until after his expatriation. 
Oh, my dear sir, if you have any shadow of doubt as 
to the invincibility of your destiny ; if A^on have any 
regard for your fair future fame ; if you have any hope 
to die in peace and rest even in undisturbed oblivion, I 
implore you to avoid this stirrer-up of strife, whose 
restless spirit seeks even now to mate with your un- 
rippled being. If there be any remote land, any place 
"where tropic suns breed pestilence," to which he 
might be induced to accept voluntary banishment, 



A MAN OF DESTINY. 59 

even by the bestowment of the best office that shall be 
in your gift, I pray you do not withhold your favor. A 
grateful country will bless you for the act, and I am 
sure your party would wilHngly create for this express 
purpose, say a Central American mission, with practi- 
cally unlimited perquisites and life tenure, provided 
only that residence at Guayaquil be made compulsory 
on the incumbent. Yerbum sat. 

Siva. 
New York, December 30. 



ISTo. Y. 

ACTIOl^ AISTD Il^ACTIOlSr MUTITALLY EQUAL. 

To Groyer Clevelan"d, President Elect: 

My Dear Sir, — It is exceedingly gratifying to know 
that the letters heretofore addressed to you have not 
been entirely without effect. It has been my hope and 
purpose from the first to prick your consciousness so as 
at least to waken you to the fact that even a man 
of destiny cannot trust altogether to his luck. My 
thorough knowledge of your character convinced me 
that the onl^^ method of appeal at all likely to be 
heeded was to invite the public to look upon you as 3^ou 
know yourself to be, the one ^lenient of 3"our nature 
strong enough to afford leverage to a good purpose 
being your love of approbation. I wished, if possible, 
to stir you up to achieve a nobler eminence and deserve 
a better fame than the vain distinction of being a mere 
inert favorite of fortune. While I cannot truthfully 
declare that I have a very exalted opinion either of 
your moral worth or intellectual power, the fact is not 
to be denied that a marvelous concatenation of events 
has placed before you an opportunity for noble and 
patriotic achievement quite unparalleled in our past 
history, save only in the cases of Washington and 
Lincoln. You will note that these men obtained im- 
mortality, not by inaction, self-gratulation or prema- 
ture boastfulness, but by a humility almost amounting 



A MAN OF DESTINY. 61 

to distrust, a devotion to the interests of the country 
which extinguished all consideration of self and a fear- 
less performance of duty without regard to part}^ or 
faction, save as instrumentalities by which great ends 
might be accomplished. It was not opportunity that 
made these great names, but the improvement of 
opportunity. In their cases the opportunities demanded 
unusual mental powers, a fitness to be derived only 
from an intimate and peculiar knowledge of public 
men and measures, and of the interests and character- 
istics of the whole country. 

Washington, when called to lead the continental 
armies, was unquestionably the man of widest military 
experience, with the most proved executive power, and 
the most extensive knowledge of the leading men, 
business interests, and characteristics of the various 
colonies, that the country contained. He knew the 
north, the south, the east, and the west of the king's 
dominions in America more thoroughly than any other 
man of his day. It was undoubtedly this extensive 
knowledge of a continent, the vastness and capacity of 
which no other so well understood, that led him at the 
most critical juncture of the war to R-X his camp at 
Yalley Forge, covering the one known avenue to the 
boundless west, in which, if the worst should come, a 
few hundred veterans might constitute not only an in- 
vincible force, but also tlie nucleus of a new empire, 
which would make the thin line of settlements along 
the coast utterly indefensible by any foreign power. 
So, too, when he came to the presidency, he both knew 
the people better, and Avas better known of them, than 



62 A MAN OF DESTINY. 

any man in the country. The same was true in a pe- 
culiar sense of Mr. Lincoln. He knew the south by 
inherent instinct. His parents had brought with them 
from the Kentucky knobs that particuhirly character- 
istic stamp which the south puts upon its poorer 
classes. No man born of such parentage can ever ex- 
punge his birth-right mark. To this was added an espe- 
cially intimate knowledge of all phases of western life, 
\Yhile both were supplemented by an official experience 
familiarizing him not only with the routine of public 
business, but with the public men and measures of the 
time, a professional experience of great scope and va- 
riety, and a forensic training that fitted him to cope 
successfully with the foremost political debater of that 
period of marvelous oratorial displays. Added to all 
these, he had in a very marked degree, thatpeculiar 
sympathy with the needs and thoughts of others that 
fitted him to interpret, with the utmost accuracy and 
subtlety, the unuttered aspirations of the people. 
"The common poople heard him gladly," and re- 
sponded to every appeal for their support which he 
made as the nation's head, because he had listened 
with tender sympathy to the throbbing of the great 
national heart, and Avhen he spoke to them he only 
phrased their own unconscious thought. 

You have been compared hy inconsiderate admirers 
to both of these immortal names. Save in opportunity 
there is no room for such comparison ; contrast only 
defines the relation between you and them in every other 
respect. Thus far your right to recognition, even as a 
child of destiny, rests upon the good fortune which has 



^ A MAN OF DESTINY. 63 

attended inaction. Your fame, if such a thing you 
have, is based upon bare negation ; theirs upon hard 
achievement. Yet neither of these men would at any 
period of their Hves have dreamed of assuming the 
boastful Jovian tone of your recent letter to Mr. Cur- 
tis, ^'either would either of these simple, manly 
natures have written or inspired a letter intended to 
read one way and be taken another. Reading your 
letter yesterday I felt irresistibly compelled to go back 
and refresh my moral nature by a reperusal of that 
open letter addressed by Mr. Lincoln, " To whom it 
may concern," and said to have been published, or at 
least prepared, without the knowledge of any of his 
cabinet, by which in apt but unmistakable words he 
cut the knot of a most embarrassing and difficult situa- 
tion; put an end to a most perilous cabal, and yet 
showed in every sentence the modesty and self-forget- 
ful earnestness of the inborn gentleman combined with 
the fervor of a devoted patriot. Should you ever have 
reason to prepare another document intended for the 
people, alloAV me to suggest the advisability of having 
your amanuensis read and study the speeches and pa- 
pers of the great liberator. If he could acquire some- 
thing of the simple earnestness and evident sincerity 
which characterize that great man's public utterances 
it would unquestionably be of signal service to you in 
the future. Perhaps, however, it is too much to expect 
a nature such as yours to even assume the mental linea- 
ments of one so nobly great. 

Indeed, it is not necessary that you should show 
yourself in any important particular the equal of either 



64 A MAN OF DESTINY. 

of these great world-exemplars. While the oppor- 
tunity lies before you for the achievement of a renoAvn 
not less glorious and enduring than theirs, your task 
is a thousand-fold less difficult of accomplishment, and 
demands no such rare combination of mental and moral 
gifts. They required the wisdom of the serpent, the 
gentleness of the dove, the keenness of the eagle's vis- 
ion, and the courage of the lion-heart. The attributes 
which your situation demands are very different. The 
stubbornness of the ass, the kicking capacity of the 
mule, and the insensibility of the salamander are the 
three prime moral qualities wliich are essential to your 
success. Only the most moderate mental attainments 
are requisite to enable you to take advantage of your 
good fortune and become more famous than your 
rosiest dreams have ever pictured your future. It must 
be admitted, too, that you are peculiarly well fitted to 
undertake this task and utilize your opportunities. 
Your characteristics are not unlike those required by 
the situation, though lacking the peculiar activity and 
earnestness which characterize the rearward manifes- 
tations of the equine hybrid. Your stubbornness has 
been much vaunted by that wing of your supporters 
who seek to find a justification of their own recent de- 
fection from the republican party in some notable 
sinus that parts the rubicundity of your triumph- 
lighted visage, and betokens an unparalleled invinci- 
bility of patriotic purpose. They declare, with some- 
thing of the overpositiveness that betrays a latent du- 
biousness, that you will stand immovable as a wall 
between the "hungry horde" who are already burning 



A MAN OF DESTINY. 65 

incense under your nostrils in public and m secret heat- 
ing the gridiron which is to be applied to the more 
conspicuous and sensitive portion of your development 
in cjise of your refusal to accede to their demands. Xo 
doubt many of them have misconceived your ponder- 
ous vis eiiertia, and accepted it for active resisting 
capacity. 

Gradually a doubt in regard both to your ability and 
inclination to resist such pressure, not in the pubhc 
thought, but in what these declarants are pleased to 
call the minds of " the best men " — that blessed rem- 
nant who are to us what the five virtuous souls would 
have been to Sodom had they by good luck been 
therein. In fact, the public, meaning thereby the 
masses of the people, have given very little credence 
to such re])orts, having not only an abiding confidence 
in the frailty of human nature, but especially in that 
human nature wdiich makes averments essentially at 
variance with its own surroundings, antecedents, and 
reasonable inclinations. Besides that, the general 
public is composed of two great classes, republic- 
ans and democrats. The masses of the republican 
party entertain no doubt that the leaders of the democ- 
racy would never have permitted your election to the 
presidency, under the auspices of that party, unless 
they had the most direct and positive assurance that 
you would spare no exertion to supply, by hook or 
by crook, the " hungry hordes " that look to you for 
the reasonable rewards of services rendered. So, too, 
the masses of the democratic party regarded Avith smil- 
ing incredulity the declaration of the allied ''mug- 
5 



Q^ A MAN OF DESTINY. 

wumps" that you had surrendered your conscience and 
your power into their keeping, and that offices and 
endowments were to constitute no part of tlie reward 
of the faithf uL They know too well the characteristics 
of the party, with what strength of nerve and equi- 
nimity of stomach it faces the stench of evil deeds and 
the glare of popular odium. They have too firm a 
confidence in the pertinacity and^unscrupulousness of 
its controlling elements to doubt its capacity to shift 
your center of gravity, should you have been so indis- 
creet as to have made any such resolution as the mid- 
wives who believed themselves to have officiated at 
your second birth attributed to you. This mass of in- 
credulous listeners to this old-wife's fable were con- 
firmed in their views by the evidently clear and truth- 
ful portrayal of your mental and moral lineaments in 
these letters. In the face of this evident testimony of 
public sentiment the little group of worshiping perfec- 
tionists who thought they had entered into and per- 
vaded your being by some transmutation similar to 
that which impelled the swine "down a steep place 
into the sea," even began to waver in their many times 
repeated confidence in their ability to wag the dog, 
the head of which you chance to represent, while they 
but constitute its tail's bedraggled tip. 

Under these circumstances, Mr. Curtis and his friends, 
in the high-sounding name of an indefinite body, whose 
shadowy outlines may be made to embrace unnumbered 
thousands, by the magic of a vivid fancy brooding over 
chaotic space, addressed you a letter, portentous in 
form and pathetic in its tone of ill-concealed apprehen- 



A MAN OF DESTINY. 67 

sion, begging 3^ou to say something that might be used 
to soothe and pacify those who had followed them in 
their desertion from the republican camp. 

I do not blame you for being annoyed at this unsea- 
sonable and unreasonable request. It was a most 
provoking letter ; there can be no doubt of that, and 
only a practical marplot like Mr. Cartis would ever 
have thought of placing you in such a dilemma at such 
a time, when your Christmas dinner was already spoiled, 
and your digestion threatened for a month to come 
with vain efforts to solve the problem how best to 
serve imperiled favorites whom you dare not neglect — 
whether you should dismiss out and out the charges of 
corruption against your official friends, or leave them 
to be lost in transit between your hands and your suc- 
cessor's. Besides that, it put you in that situation of 
all things most unpleasant to a man of your temper 
and inclination — a place where something must be done. 

Fortunately, it w^as not a situation that, according to 
your settled determination of appearing to run with 
the hare and actually holding with the hounds, admit- 
ted of more than one course. A letter must be written. 
It would not do to fall back upon the threadbare gen- 
eralities of that scantily-furnished document — your 
letter of acceptance. To do that, even you at once 
perceived, would be to confirm the scorn of those who 
mocked and weaken the faith of those who tried to 
believe. It was necessary that the letter should be so 
framed as to accomplish several distinct purposes. 
First, it was essential that it should seem to say to Mr. 
Curtis any his friends that you would devote your 



68 A MAN OF DESTINY. 

entire time and undiminished energy from 8:30 a. m. 
until 11:59 p. m., during your entire term of office, 
Sundays and the Fourth of July alone excepted, in 
studying and applying in letter and in spirit, the all- 
important and never-to-be-sufficiently exalted ideas of 
the ]^. C. S. It. L., and applying the same according to 
the notions of the said body, and especially that you 
would exercise the constitutional prerogative only by 
the advice and consent of those assuming to speak on 
its behalf. After tliis had been so clearly set forth as 
to seem unmistakable, it was still more essential that it 
should be made clearly apparent to the rank and file 
of the democracy that your ideas of civil-service reform 
were not at all of a character to interfere with the dis- 
tribution of the public patronage to '' hungry hordes " 
whose girdles were drawn to the last hole to stay the 
pangs which gnawed their long collapsed organs. The 
letter must be of a character to quiet the apprehen- 
sions of one class and at the same time confirm the 
expectations of the other. 

This task would seem to most natures to be by no 
means easy of performance, but to you it appeared to 
present no difficulty, A singular scorn of the public 
capacity for discriminating between the true and the 
false, the genuine and the sham, has grown up in your 
mind as a result of your own experience. Even your 
phenomenal self-appreciation cannot hide from you the 
fact that the public has been wheedled with the most 
transparent devices to accept you at an overvaluation 
which even you found it for a long time almost impos- 
sible to accept. This knowledge leads you to suppose 



A MAN OF DESTINY. 69 

that, at least in all things relative to yourself, the pub- 
lic are so gullible and greedy to believe impossible 
things, that it will take note of no inconsistency and 
doubt no absurdity that 3^ou m^y utter. 

This was the theory on which your replj^ to Mr. 
Curtis was evidently framed. The man to whom you 
entrusted its preparation performed his task fairh^ 
well. The document is altogether the most creditable 
that has yet appeared over your signature. It is not 
so puerile as your vetoes, so crude and disjointed as 
your letter of acceptance, nor so amazingly redundant 
in egotistic iteration as your scattering s])eeches of the 
campaign. It is evident to a tyro that the same hand 
could not have written this epistle and the famous let- 
ter to the wife of that eminent clerical advocate of 
your election, whose course was almost as exceptional 
among his brethren as the argument he used in press- 
ing your claim was singular and amazing in the mouth 
of a minister and astoundino-ly suo-o^estive in his own. 

It is especially creditable to the draughtsman of this 
instrument that he has left tiie loophole of escape, in 
the words of a favorite legal maxim, " wide enough to 
drive a cart and oxen through." In setting you up 
against that paper boulder known as the civil-service 
act, which looks so terribly firm and is so feathery, 
light and frail, he is careful not to commit you by 
denominating it a law or even an act of congress, but 
simply a " statute " — a thing having the form of law, 
an enactment expressing the will of a legislative body, 
but which may or may not be within the scope of their 
authority. This you are made subtly to a])prove, be- 



70 A AIA^ OF DESTINY. 

cause your belief in democratic reverence for law is so 

overwhelming as to require that "all statutes should 

be enforced in good faith." The picture is a fine and 

graphic one. Some historical artist should seize upon 

the idea and give us your heroic figure, full life-size or 

a little more, its broader part securely braced against 

the rock of civil service, your hand brandishing the 

sword of reform, and your lips shouting to the hungry 

hordes in front : 

"Come one! Come all! This rock shall fly 
From its firm base as soon as I! " 

Unfortunately for this idea, you know, and every one 
knows, that this pretended rock has no basis in the 
constitution ; that a republican president has recog- 
nized it and allowed it to be enforced only because he 
thought there was a public desire that the experiment 
should be tried, and that you, as a democratic president, 
Avill be duly authorized, empowered and expected to 
kick this pretended barrier to flinders and wield the 
sword of reform for the decapitation of all republican 
officials, with a willingness and alertness that will 
soothe the "perturbed spirit" of the patron saint of 
democracy who first exemplified the power of that 
inspiring watchword, "To the victors belong the 
spoils." 

It is a singular fact that the civil service reformers, 
while professing a regard for the law which they 
modestly claim to be too exalted for the comprehension 
of ordinary minds, have yet begun their good work by 
securing the adoption of a statute admittedly and un- 
questionably unconstitutional and void in nearly all of 



A MAN OF DESTINY. 71 

its provisions, saving and excepting the establishment 
of a well-salaried commission to do such work as it may 
suit " the gracious will and pleasure " of the president 
to allow them to perform. It is well known, especially 
to you who know so well how strong in seeming yet how 
weak in fact such vague pretensions are, that the rules 
adopted by President Arthur are not binding upon his 
successors, and that the president defacto may at any 
time not only revise, modify, abrogate, or disregard such 
rules, but he may decline to make new ones, and leave 
the entire machine created bv the statute with nothinor- 

o 

to act upon. From the first the advocates of this 
measure have not dared to claim any binding force in 
this farcical simulation of legislative forms, but have 
simply declared that when once the new machine got 
into running order no president would dare refuse to 
fill the hopper and recognize the grist. They apparently 
forgot that the abuse of legal forms — the designation 
of that as law, which depends solely on the will of 
the chief executive for its sanction, is one of the most 
fruitful methods of debauching the public mind and 
breaking down respect for legitimate enactment and 
constitutional authorit}^ 

They seem also to have forgotten that by such en- 
actment tliey were offering to a president who might 
be so inclined, not onl\^ a j^ou sto on whicli to rest the 
lever of his authority in an attempt to overthrow the 
entire system, but have also put in his hands a weapon 
which, wiekled by a skillful hand with the ever-faithful 
democracy standing ready to back his patriotic claim, 
would constitute a very potent defense before that 



I'Z A MAN OF DESTINY. 

tribunal most supremely jealous of all usurpation of 
authority, the American people. They have constantly 
boasted that no president would dare defy the public 
sentiment which would be aroused by a disregard of 
the provisions of this so-called act of congress. Yet a 
president might well say that his oath of office bound 
him to support the constitution, and that to recognize 
anything having the form of law and claiming, ajjrio/i 
to be a valid enactment which was yet inconsistent 
with constitutional requirement was a palpable viola- 
tion of this oath. He might even go farther and assert 
that to recognize an act or mere concurrent resolution 
of the two houses of congress as law which professes 
to limit or contravene, directly or indirectly, the dis- 
cretion vested by the constitution in the chief execu- 
tive, no matter how heartily he might approve the 
general purpose and intent of such a measure, would 
be in derogation of his oath and lending the sanction 
of precedent to what might lead to dangerous usurpa- 
tion on the part of the legislative branch of the gov- 
ernment in the future. It would be entirely consistent 
for such a man to ph;nt his feet upon the rock of the 
constitution and appeal to the people to sustain him in 
a contest for its preservation and sanctity. He might 
even refuse to recognize the so-called law and at the 
same time consistently and urgentl}^ recommend the 
submission of a constitutional amendment authorizing 
the legal estabhshment of such a system to the legisla- 
tures of the various states. This would make such a 
man par excellence the civil-service reformer of the 
day; would transfer the whole question to the original 



A MAN OF DESTINY. 73 

source of power, the people of the different states; 
would be in entire accord with democratic doctrine, 
and especially complimentary of the carefully con- 
ditioned advocacy of a reform of the civil service in- 
corporated in the last democratic platform without any 
specific or troublesome allusion to the reform which the 
republican party, with the help of "Gentleman George" 
and a few other democrats since held in marked disfa- 
vor by their party associates, had already attempted to 
put in operation. 

Such a man would require some nerve and a tough 
hide. The republican party would represent a constant 
line of fire in his front. The civil-service reformers would 
keep the air full of hissing rockets and sulphurous 
exhalations. Yet a united and uxultant democracy 
would stand behind him armed to the teeth with argu- 
gument, flying a motley array of banners perhaps, as 
they did throughout the south in jubilation over your 
election, but every one of them would be inscribed 
with some laudatory device expressive of undying de- 
votion to the constitution. The salvos of praise that 
would be fired into his ears would drown the remote 
din of the opposition ; other issues Avould be overlaid ; 
time would J be gained, and it is by no means certain 
that he would not win. The fact is that a president 
who sits squarely down on any part of the constitution 
and constantly reiterates his determination to stay, no 
matter how hard the storm may blow, is a terrible 
hard squatter to remove. Mr. Plendricks has already 
manifested a willingness to volunteer for such a task, 
and there is no reasonable doubt that, in case Provi- 



74 A MAN OF DESTINY. 

dence should kindly furnish him the opportunity, the 
rugged old Hoosier would carry out such a policy with 
a vim and energy that would recall to the minds of 
the most ancient moss-backs of the party the palmiest 
days of " Old Hickory." Such a course would be 
somewhat too active and positive a policy for you to 
be expected to adopt of your own notion, yet if it 
should promise advantage to yourself your letter 
shows that you are not unmindful of its existence, and 
that you recognize the value of that harmonious eva- 
sion which appears in the democratic platform, which 
is somewhat clumsily phrased in j^our letter of accept- 
ance and is embodied with labored fullness in the last 
diagnostic bulletin of your mental condition. 

Respectfully, 
New York, January 7, 1885. Siva. 



No. YI. 

SAUCE FOE THE GOOSE. 

To Groyer Cleveland, President-Elect : 

Ml/ Dear Su\ — Though I noted several points in 
your carefully prepared letter to Mr. Curtis, in my last, 
there are some very significant ones which space did 
not allow me there to consider. Mr. Henry Waterson, 
in his recent flippant attacl^ upon your defeated oppo- 
nent, says that if you " were ten times a statesman you 
could not fill the expectation of your supporters." 
Remembering what " a hungry horde " Mr. Curtis 
lately claimed the bulk of them to be, this may be ac- 
cepted as undeniably true. At the same time it is 
evident that without having given evidence of being 
even once a statesman, you are determined to try the 
experiment. Perhaps no literary curiosity, certainly 
no public document, was ever so evenly balanced and 
carefully divided as your first pnblic act in relation to 
the presidency since your election — your letter to Mr. 
Curtis. This is in effect the first act of your adminis- 
tration and as such, merits especial scrutiny. A man 
who studies it with your character clearly defined in 
his memory will be well rewarded. It is unquestion- 
ably the key of that policy which will be inaugurated 
on the 4th of March next, and on the success or failure 
of which your future fame will rest, nothing of your 
past being of sufiicient importance to color it, and no 

75 



76 A MAN OF DESTINY. 

farther future being probable. One-half, by actual 
measurement, was devoted to assuring the civil-service 
reformers that you always had been and always would 
be a stanch and earnest supporter of their peculiar 
views — while the latter undivided moiety is occupied 
with assuring ^^our democratic friends that the}^ have 
nothing to fear from any such proclivity on your part. 
For each of these purposes it is a li ttle curious that you 
require the same number of words, or to be more pre- 
cise, two hundred and eighty-one for the one and two 
hundred and seventy-nine for the other. 

Most public men are called upon at times to w^eigh 
their words, but you are probably the only one that 
ever counted them. So far as actual partition w^as 
possible, you divided your powers of assertion and 
assurance equally to the two inharmonious elements 
between which you stand as the one point of peaceable 
contact. It is true that the reformers are few^ and the 
democrats many, that the one desired a promise that 
you would continue to bear testimony in favor of tlieir 
pet idea and the other a satisfactory assurance that 
vou intended a .square deal. It Avas not your policy 
to offend either, and while you Avalked hand in hand 
wnth both no one should ever accuse you of partiality. 
So you measured out with the most rigorous good faith 
two hundred and eighty words of taffy to the small 
but select band upon the left, and a like amount of re- 
assurance to the "hungry horde" upon the right. 
This even-handed distribution of favor you, perhaps, 
expect to be satisfactor}^ to both, and never once dream 
that either faction will look upon one half of the letter 



A MAN OF DESTINY. 77 

as a practical nullification of the other, leaving you 
really in the condition of one wiio has not spoken at 
all. Such was not the view which a leading light of 
the democracy took of the letter, which he read and 
commented upon in my hearing : 

" It is evident," said he, " that Mr. Cleveland means 
to play 'mugwump' against democrat and make each 
the excuse for not satisfying the other, and it won't 
do." 

I confess it had not occurred to me before how deftly 
you w^ere preparing to secure your own ease and inac- 
tion by offsetting against each other the mutually con- 
flicting forces whose united action constituted you 
what you are, and who now look forward with no little 
anxiety to see w^hat you will he. 

This letter paves the way for three distinct openings 
or gambits, as a chess-player would sav, either of which 
you may adopt at the outset of your administration, 
or fall back upon at any future stage of the game. It 
makes it possible for you to go with either of these 
factions; to yield something to the one and grant 
much to the other, or, in the event that it should be 
impossible for you to secure harmony by a half-way 
course of that character, to cut loose from both and 
take such course as might seem to you for the good of 
the nation, without regard to individuals, parties, or 
factions. Perhaps I ought to add a fourth, modeled 
on your gubernatorial policy, to wit, a continual state 
of threatening to take eacli of these courses in alter- 
nation and ultimately taking neither. Considering 
these various gambits of the great match you are 



78 A MAN OF DESTINY. 

about to play, it should be remembered that your own 
fame as a Man of Destiny, as you styled yourself 
when your election to the presidency first became a 
fact to your consciousness, is the great stake for which 
you will play. Second in rank no doubt in your mind 
is the success and approval of the democratic party, 
not from any lively sense of gratitude for the honor it 
has conferred upon itself in making you its candidate, 
but from a well-founded fear of the castig-ation it 
would bestow upon you in case you should betray its 
trust and disappoint its hopes. You know how relent- 
lessly it pursues its enemies and how it heaps up curses 
on the graves of those who dare to abandon its tenets, 
and you can imagine what an eternity of infamy it 
would attach to his name who, by its power, had been 
wafted to the pinnacle of honor and Avho should then 
deny to it the well-earned and long-deferred pillage of 
the enemy's camp. At the same time you are not un- 
mindful of the torment you may receive from that 
small but restless, arrogant, uncompromising, and not- 
to-be-intimidated faction, the "independents." It is 
an apparent misfortune, but may prove to you a real 
blessing, that something better than nine-tenths of the 
votes cast for your electors were so thrown because the 
voters believed you to be a good, stanch, and reliable 
democrat, while the other small but necessary fraction 
claim to have voted for you on the especial ground 
that you were not a dyed-in-the-wool democrat, but 
were a modified half and half sort of new type, if not 
even a distinct species, whose especial characteristic 
was an irresistible inclination to disregard the wishes 



A MAN OF DESTINY. 79 

and despise the methods of the party to whom he 
owed his elevation. These men are a most unpleasant 
fact to one of your temperament and inclination. 
Like a hornet, thev are always found sting-end upper- 
most. They sting their friends to show their inde- 
pendence, their enemies to show their impartiality, and 
each other to keep themselves in practice. They are a 
bundle of crooked sticks, who show all the bio-o^er for 
the knots and protuberances which stick out on all 
sides. They are an uncomfortable lot at the best and 
it may yet become a most serious question for your de- 
cision whether they are the more unpleasant in con- 
junction or apogee. 

Considering all these facts in connection with your 
well-known mental cliaracteristics, it hardly admits of 
a doubt what course you will attempt to pursue. It is 
as certain as any future event can be that you will at- 
tempt to divide your administration as you have your 
letter, pretty equally between the two allied forces and 
will endeavor to use each to restrain the urgency of the 
other. You will say to the independents, when they 
protest against a slaughter of the innocents : 

" Well, you know I must yield something to the 
prejudices and importunity of my democratic friends. 
I shouldn^t have a day's peace if I did not make some 
removals. As it is now, they worry me almost to death. 
I am as good a civil-service reformer as an}^ one, but I 
cannot do everything at once. We must go slow. I 
was a civil-service reformer before I was elected gov- 
ernor. Don't you know I reformed the police when I 
was mayor of Buffalo? I wanted to continue the 



80 A MAN OF DESTINY. 

lumgman who had done such jobs for a number of 
years, when I was sheriff ; but the watchword tlien was 
'economy and reform' — economy coming first you ob- 
serve — 'and a reduction in the number of officials.' 
Now, it was evidently cheaper and saved one official 
for me to do the job myself. Believing every ' public 
office to be a public trust' I could not well have done 
otherwise. You need have no fear of me as a reformer, 
but you know these clerks and postmasters and the like 
have nearly all of them made themselves odious to the 
good people of their respective vicinities by their politi- 
cal course. I su])pose nearly every one of them voted 
the republican ticket, and probably most of them did 
it openly, or at least told of it, perhaps bragged about 
it. No doubt a good many of them paid money to 
secure my defeat. This will never do. Such people 
' must be taught ' that a modest exercise of their political 
privileges means something entirely different from that. 
We must go slow, and you must have patience with 
me. I mean all right. You just Avait till my adininis- 
stration ends before you make up your mind about it. 
Don't judge it by piecemeal — all I want is time and 
opportunity. I only wish that civil service was not 
such a weak, imperfect thing. If it were only well 
founded in the constitution I would soon show these 
applicants for office what is what. As it is now, don't 
you see I am afraid if I stand too straight on it they 
will repeal the whole thing. Then where will our civil- 
service reform be ? It must be worked easy and quietly 
for a few terms, with a good many exceptions to the 
rule, you know, and after awhile it will get such a hold 



A MAN OF DESTINY. 81 

on the public mind that no one will ever think of ques- 
tioning its validity. Just wait till I get through and 
you will see." 

When your civil-service reform follower shall have 
left the presence, you will tell to the lean and hungry 
democrat who succeeds him and who comes with volu- 
minous recommendations in behalf of himself and his 
friends to seek the reward of a score of years of hope- 
less and deD:racUno^ servitude to democratic inconsist- 
ency and folly — you will tell to this man who urges 
the necessity of making hay during the continuance of 
the accidental sunshine of your supremacy a very dif- 
ferent stor\^. 

You understand full well his- sad condition. You 
know how for years the distended teat of public pat- 
ronage has hung within liis sight, but just above his 
reach. You know how the tantalizing vision has filled 
his sleeping and waking thought, how " scppe etiam 
nunc ubera mamTnaruTn in somnis lactantia qumretP 
You understand how hope has led him on during this 
long period of irrepressible yearning and enforced 
abstinence : 

"And wherever the way seemed long, 
Or his heart began to fail, 
She sang a more wonderful song, 
Or told a more marvelous tale." 

With all this burden of accumulated hopes and the 
angry vehemence which springs from long-continued 
and unjust denial of unquestionable right, you are well 
aware that the long-suffering patriot is dreadfully in 
earnest. He is of too much consequence to be denied 
6 



82 A MAN OF DESTINY. 

a hearing, and has never earned a place upon the long 
list of those who have condemned themselves to eter- 
nal disfavor by even a weak admission that the most 
marked of your personal characteristics does not con- 
stitute a prime prerequisite for the proper discharge of 
the duties of the presidential office, which is in its 
nature, you will remember, " essentially executive/' 
He served your interests by serving the partv which 
has heaped its highest honors on your head, long be- 
fore you were discovered, dug out of the malodorous 
slums of Buffalo and set up a whitewashed sham for 
an earnest and clean-minded people to bow before as 
an exemplar of American life and the representative 
of national power. There is no sham about your vis- 
itor. With him ''life is real, life is earnest." He 
believes in God and the democracy, and if he has ever 
any doubt with regard to either, dutifully gives the 
Supreme Being the benefit thereof. He is a stanch 
friend and a good hater — a prime average democrat of 
the ancient regulation standard. To such a man you 
will say, when he delicately hints that the doctrine of 
rewards and punishments is an essential canon of or- 
thodox democracy, according to the tenor of the latter 
moiety of your recent epistle : 

" I quite agree with you, my dear sir, and just as 
fast as I can, Avithout waking an outcry against my- 
self, you will find that I shall do precisely as you sug- 
gest. I don't intend to forget the democratic party, 
nor go back on its principles or its workers. You 
may be sure of that. But we must go slow. You see 
it won't do to fly in the face of this civil-service reform 



A MAN OF DESTINY. 83 

idea all at once. I must be careful and get up a repu- 
tation as a reforming president, you know. Only let 
these folks talk me up for a year or two and it don't 
make any difference what they say afterward. They 
expect me to go a good way anyhow. They know 
something how I am situated, and if I confine myself 
for a time mainly to those offices that the civil-service 
farce does not apply to they will laud me to the skies. 
Then when I have gotten through with these, and they 
have established my reputation, we can turn in on the 
others, and, upon one cause or another, remove the last 
one of them. I tell you that I am going to stand by 
the democracy, and before my term is over you will 
find every office in the country, with few notable ex- 
ceptions, left on purpose to refer to as certificates of 
character, in possession of the party, and we will go 
into the next campaign with all the offices and all the 
money behind us. That is what I am after — a long 
lease of power instead of a short term. We will ' turn 
the rascals out,' on the plea of reforming the civil 
service, and when we get everything in our own hands, 
will oust the reformers themselves on the ground of a 
tender regard for the constitutional rights of my suc- 
cessors, and then, with a ' solid south ' to back us up 
and growing solider every day, we can keep the rascals 
out indefinitely. But we must go slow, my friend; 
we must 0:0 slow. It would not do to rouse the civil- 
service reformers too soon. If we do the republicans 
will whirl in and propose a constitutional amendment, 
as the reformers ought to have done at the start, and 
by getting a solid north against us lay us out ' as stiff 



84 A MAN OF DESTINY. 

as a mackerel ' next time. We must not give them 
time to combine and rally on that line before the next 
election." 

This plan of alternate doses of taffy to each of the 
conflicting elements is undoubtedly the policy you have 
decided upon to secure your peace and comfort and the 
continued adulation of both during the early part of 
your administration at least. It is possible that you 
even entertain a hope that it may be a part of your in- 
calculable destmy to carry this scheme through your 
whole term — to dazzle the eyes of the reformers with 
shallow pretenses, to feed the democracy with hopes 
until you can gradually satisfy them with more sub- 
stantial tokens of your loyalty to the party, and so 
perhaps close your presidential career and leave behind 
a fame as dubious and ill-defined as your present repu- 
tation. It is possible that in this you may succeed. 
So far as the reformers are concerned they are unques- 
tionably the most easily deceived body of men ever 
found in American politics. All that they need is a 
toy-mirror which reflects and magnifies themselves. 
As long as you turn this toward them and show them 
their own lineaments extended to heroic dimensions 
they will be content. The major portion of them are 
men who lack that constitutional ruf]:o^edness which 
would enable them to mingle in the struggle of parties 
and win that leadership they believe themselves intel- 
lectually fitted to exercise. They are skilled swords- 
men, but the sweat and dust of the arena^ the clamor 
of the populace, and the focusing upon them of un- 
numbered eyes are too much for their self-control, and 



A MAN OF DESTINY. 85 

the untrained Philistine, who has only audacity, brute 
strength, and insensibility to such influences in his 
favor, bears them down and carries off the palm. 
There are probably ten thousand of these sensitive 
souls who would have died of agony had the blistering 
facts your life reveals been blazoned to the world. These 
men admire you all the more because of that natural 
insensibility which led you to regard these things with 
only a sort of wandering incredulity. Their feeling is 
one of amazement that you lived through the storm of 
shameful allegation against Avhich there was no shield 
even of reasonable doubt. Your feeling is one of sur- 
prise that any one should deem it really important 
whether such things were true or not. This uncom- 
prehended fact makes you to them a hero, and you 
have only tt) impress upon their minds the fact that 
you endured all this terrible castigation in the patriotic 
and self-forgetful hope of pushing forward their pet 
idea, to make them your willing slaves, who will count 
themselves honored by the pressure of your foot upon 
their necks. There are others of this class whom the 
world has forgotten, and who have never forgiven the 
world for this act of transparent injustice. They, too, 
wish to see themselves reflected in the mirror of suc- 
cess. They will not ask much, but if you can keep 
them well inflated with the idea that you exist and act 
mainly for their approval, they will permit you to do 
almost anything without suspicion or rebuke. For 
these men 3^ou have only to call your most flagrant use 
of power a reformatory measure, and they will be con- 
tent. They are given to tlie use of superlatives, too. 



86 A MAN OF DESTINY. 

and a few months of merely tolerable forbearance in 
the use of the guillotine will estop forever their con- 
demnation. 

Thus far your plan is a good one, and apparently as 
feasible as riding down a slippery slope on a toboggan. 
The other part of the programme, however, presents 
more difficulty. Xo democrat has ever dared attempt 
to stand between that party in the hour of victory and 
the spoils for which it fought. 'No one who has the most 
remote knowledge of your character anticipates any 
sucli display of heroism on your part, neither does any 
such person suppose that you at all believe that there 
is any good reason why you should make such an 
attempt. While you are by no means deficient in a 
cunning which sometimes approaches sagacity^ the pur- 
pose you have in view is invariably your own advan- 
tage. You are greedy of fame and the approval of 
mankind, so long as the same may be secured without 
sacrifice or exertion on your part. You know that you 
have nothing to expect after the term which will so soon 
begin. You would like to float through its four years 
softly and easily. You would be glad to have it said 
that you had made a reasonably fair president. You 
do not care about having it said that you have done much 
good, if you can escape the reputation of having done 
great harm. If you cannot accomplish this desirable 
feat, however, you are sure to go with that faction who 
will ffive vou the best backing: and be most likelv to 
speak well of you after your political demise. This 
being the case, you are no more likely to put yourself 
into the hands of the reformers than to strike out for 



A MAN OF DESTINY. 87 

yourself on any independent line of administration ; but 
when the laudation of the reformers has neutralized 
the effect of future blame, and duplicity is no longer 
possible, you will abandon the gamut with which a^ou 
set out, cast yourself into the arms of the democracy 
without reserve, and hope to win remembrance on that 
day which is annually dedicated to its hero saint, as one 
who, if you could not emulate his virtue, was not afraid 
to practice his vices — who, if you had neither oppor- 
tunity nor capacity to save the nation, did not forget to 
divide the spoils, and thereby save the party which he 
founded, by restoring the policy he inaugurated. 

Yours respectfully. 
New York, January 15, 1885. SiVA. 



ISTo. YIL 

''COXFIKMATIOK STKOXG AS PEOOFS FEOM 
HOLY WEIT." 

To Grover Cleveland, Presiclent-Elect : 

3fy Dear Sir, — Events are hastening. Little more 
than a month and you will be the president — the first 
of a democratic dynasty or the most stupendous of 
political failures. Every incident that occurs tends 
not only to confirm the truth of my predictions, but 
also the correctness of my diagnosis of your charac- 
ter. If your letter to Mr. Curtis had been dictated by 
me instead of being inspired by you, it could not more 
explicitly have sustained my view, both of your strength 
and your weakness. Only to a mind such as I have 
depicted yours to be could ever have occurred so trans- 
parent a device as the equable distribution of conflict- 
ing promises for the purpose of pacifying contending 
factions or misleading a watchful enemy. Perhaps 
there is not another man in the whole countr}^ who 
would not have said of such a scheme, " Surely in vain 
the net is spread in the sight of any bird." But the 
birds for whom your snare was set had so often watched 
the liming of twigs without a suspicion that you had 
come to despise their sagacity and to believe that the 
most transparent of devices employed in your behalf 
were certain to succeed. Your plan succeeded admira- 
bly because of its very simplicity. The independents as 

88 



A MAN OF DESTINY. 89 

a rule have swallowed the bolus entire for the sake of 
the treacle on the front end, while the democrats, ac- 
customed to suspect duplicity in every one, have sim- 
ply put their tongues in tiieir cheeks, pulled down an 
eye in derision of the vealiness of their suckling alUes, 
and quietly "chawing" off the last half of the 
epistle have rolled it "as a sweet jnorsel under their 
tongues." 

If I had needed explicit confirmation of my estimate 
of your character, however, I should never have looked 
to secure it in such compact and forceful form as you 
have given it in your twelve- word letter resigning the 
office of governor of the state of Xew York in order 
tiiat you might become eligible for the office of presi- 
dent of the United States. It was an occasion when 
the most ordinary respect for the people of the state 
who had lifted you from an obscurit}^ honorable neither 
in its cause nor in its character, to the highest office 
within their gift, and then, displaying an amazing for- 
bearance with your proved infirmities, had again given 
their voice to lift you to the highest pinnacle of earthly 
distinction — a distinction which you would never have 
attained but for their aid — would seem not only to 
have suggested, but to have absolutely compelled even 
the most inert and obdurate nature to have uttered 
some word of manly recognition of such unmatched 
favor. 

Considered in itself, the governorship of the Empire 
state is not an honor to be lightly assumed or care- 
lessly thrown aside, even by the most eminent and 
deserving citizen who ever dwelt within her borders. 



90 A MAN OF DESTINY. 

The long array of notable names that adorn the list 
of your predecessors — the faces of those distinguished 
patriots that looked down upon you from the walls of 
your oiRce as you wrote, as if even yet exultingly 
proud of the honor conferred upon them by their fel- 
low citizens, should have rebuked your egotism and 
have made even your stolid nature ashamed to leave so 
base a record of ingratitude. Think of either of the 
Clintons — whose names the greatness and the glory of 
the Empire state bears ever onward to a fresher im- 
mortality ; think of Tompkins — four times in succes- 
sion honored with the chief magistrac}^ ; think of 
Marcy — the irreproachable and incorruptible, who put 
aw^ay the offer of the presidency, the prospect of 
which, to 3^our mind, swallow^s up all other thought, 
proudly and scornfully, lest the future should believe 
that he could be forgetful of his pledge to another ; 
think of Seward — to whom this highest honor the state 
could give was only a stepping-stone to a pedestal that 
lifts him forever above the world's forgetfulness ; think 
of Seymour — stained though his memor}^ must ever be 
with the blood of her citizens slain in needless riot — a 
patriot by instinct made half a traitor by association ; 
think of Tilden — fallen from the pinnacle of the re- 
former to the whimpering whisperer, who was willing 
to enjoy the fruits of fraud, but too miserly to pay the 
agents of his infamy ; think even of Hoffman — till you 
came, the last and least worthy of the line : think of 
one of these or any of their compeers casting back into 
the lap of the people of the state of New York the 
highest honor in their gift, with no more sense of 



A MAN OF DESTINY. 91 

thankfulness than a tramp tvouIcI express in shjing a 
picked bone at a cur's head. 

But such an act would have been far less unbecoming 
and discreditable to any one of them than to you, for to 
even the least of your predecessors the governorship 
was a far more deserved exaltation than to yourself. 
If these eminent citizens were honored by that dignity, 
what shall be said of that man who within half a dec- 
ade before his election as governor had accounted 
himself lucky beyond all previous expectation in that 
he was thriftily allowed to perform with his own hands 
the office of the common hangman? That such a man, 
called upon to lay down the office of governor of the 
greatest state of the union in order to take by grace of 
her people the presidency of the nation, should not 
have left in the archives of the commonwealth a world 
of gratitude for their confidence, a hint of apology for 
his own shortcoming's, a seemly protest of his own de- 
merits, or at least some token of appreciation of a favor 
unparalleled in the world's history, is a fact so discred- 
itable to humanity that my pen refuses to dwell upon 
it. I have sought to trace your character for the 
information of your expectant countrymen, as it really 
is, setting down naught in malice though extenuating 
naught, but not even in the closest analysis and darkest 
limning of your nature had I ever dreamed of making 
so black and mean a picture as your own hand has 
painted in that one line of contemptuous renunciation 
of an undeserved honor in order to prepare yourself to 
accept one still greater and more unmerited at the 
hands of the same blindly trustful donors. I turn with 



92 A MAN OF DESTINY. 

a sickened heart, and rising gorge away from the dis- 
gusting spectacle to the contemplation of another 
element of that luck which you might well term destiny 
did it not lack thus far the one essential ingredient of 
the broader term's significance. 

A still more notable characteristic of the democratic 
party than either its immutability or its capacity for 
forgetting all things that do not redound to its credit, 
which have already been considered, is the magnificent 
power which it has displayed of concentrating all its 
strength upon the embarrassment and overthrow of its 
opponents. Its opposition has not been spasmodic and 
intermittent, but uniform and unremitting. It is not 
only always ready for action, but is always actually 
engaged. I^o amount of defeat discourages, nor does 
the most unexpected victor}^ so far demoralize as to 
induce it to remit, for an instant, the prime duty of 
disparaging, demoralizing, and ultimately extirpating 
its enemy. As a party of opposition, it has been match- 
less in the world's history. For twenty-four years it 
has maintained a constant state of siege. Even in its 
weakest moments it has carried on an offensive-defen- 
sive campaign of the most actively aggressive character. 
Driven from one line of works, it has not lost an hour 
in developing another. Never once has it been be- 
trayed into the partisan absurdity of willingly -con- 
tributing to its opponent's success. Standing in the 
opposition, it has left to the dominant party the entire 
responsibility of devising, passing, and enforcing all 
measures which they proposed. It has offered nothing, 
suggested nothing, supported nothing which its oppo- 



A MAN OF DESTINY. 93 

nents could make use of with credit to themselves or 
advantage to the country. If individual members of 
the party saw fit to declare themselves in favor of the 
principles underlying specific measures, they found 
abundant opportunity for excusing their opposition in 
the details. It has never for an instant forgotten that 
public opinion is not the outgrowth of a single political 
campaign. Its leaders have always been awake to the 
fact that the day. after an election is the best possible 
seed-time for the next ensuing conflict of ideas. 

During its long, and all things considered, amazingly 
briUiant career as a party of opposition, the democracy 
has never once allowed itself to be diverted from its 
natural and legitimate work of assault upon its more 
fortunate opponent by any feeling of squeamishness 
or favor. Whatever it believed would weaken its 
enemy, that it did. It was never deterred by any fear 
of doing injustice or producing disaster. Charged by 
a minority with the duty of weakening and embarrass- 
ing the administration, its senators and representatives, 
its journals and orators, and even its rank and file have 
been " instant in season and out of season " in the per- 
formance of this task, which they regarded quite as 
much and quite as justly a " public trust " as you be- 
lieve yourself to have discovered a public office to be. 
To secure this result they have well understood that 
the first great step was to undermine public confidence 
in the principles, policy and personnel of their oppo- 
nents. It has been their policy, which has at last 
proved a winning one, to nourish at all times, in all 
minds that were accessible to such influences, the idea 



94 A MAN OF DESTINY. 

that no good thing could come out of the Nazareth 
which stood over against the camp of democracy. 
Only the most unfavorable and depreciatory views of 
the men and measures of the republican party were 
ever formulated or disseminated by them. They did 
not fight to-day and land to-morrow. They did not 
stultify themselves by interlarding obloquy with ap- 
proval. They never admitted that the meanest demo- 
crat was not infinitely better, more patriotic and 
Avorthy of preference by the country than the best 
republican. Their opposition was not sentimental or 
puerile. Charged with the duty of opposing, they 
opposed. If any measure of the dominant party had 
a defective or unpopular aspect they attacked it, no 
matter what merit it possessed. If there was a salient 
point in the armor of any republican official, upon that 
point their guns were trained. If a measure was with- 
out objectionable feature, or a public character above 
reproach, it received at their hands the honor of an 
oblivion as impenetrable as tliey gave to their own 
errors, or a praise so faint that its damnatory purpose 
was evident to the most obtuse. 

In its whole career this party has hardly once com- 
mitted the absurdity of bestowing commendation upon 
an opponent except in cases where the hope of profit- 
ing by factional discord has made a temporary departure 
from its settled policy of detraction and depreciation 
apparently advisable. Even these exceptions its leading 
minds have never approved, and the ultimate results 
have usually justified the wisdom of their views. They 
have wisely abandoned the defensive policy and di- 



A MAN OF DESTINY. 95 

rected all their energies to the attack. In front and 
flank they have poured an unremitting fire upon their 
opponents, while out of traitors and deserters they 
liave organized partisan corps for whose movements 
they were not responsible, but whose attacks upon the 
rear of the party in power could not fail to redound to 
their advantage. They reversed the rule of courtesy, 
and were silent in regard to those of their opponents 
of whom something evil could not safely be spoken. 
Believing, or professing to believe, that republican as- 
cendency was inimical to the best interests of the coun- 
try, they did not stultify themselves by vaunting the 
ability, exalting the virtues, or treating with tender 
charity the possible purposes of its leading men. 
Knowing the value of iteration as an element of public 
opinion, they permitted no opportunity to escape of 
presenting their opponents in an unseemly, ridiculous, 
or re])ulsive aspect. In short, the democracy has made 
war upon the republican party from the very hour of 
Lincoln's election until the day of Blaine's defeat, with 
the settled, unremitting purpose of accomplishing its 
overthrow, and as the first and most important element 
of success in that undertaking it has scrujmlously 
avoided contributing to the strength of its adversary 
or perpetuatmg for an instant the power of the domi- 
nant party by any commendation of its men or meas- 
ures except for the incidental purpose of fomenting 
discord in its own ranks. 

This policy has not only been fully justified by re- 
sults, but is entirely consistent with patriotic principle. 
In the conflict of parties in a free government there 



96 A MAN OF DESTINY. 

always have been, and no doubt will be, as long as you 
will have any interest in the matter, two great lines of 
thought which are essentially and irreconcilably dis- 
tinct and hostile to each other. These mutually destruc- 
tive ideas are represented by great opposing parties. 
These constitute the grand divisions of political thought 
which, however strongly united by isthmian ties, are no 
more susceptible of unification than opposing con- 
tinents. ]^ow and then there come periods of political 
stagnation, when the lines of demarcation between 
them may seem to become indistinct. Such periods 
are either deceptive calms, generant of destructive 
storms, or merely periods of political incubation which 
precede the formulation of new issues and the organiza- 
tion of new forces for their dissemination and estab- 
lishment. In all such conflicts the man who honestly 
believes the one line of policy to be a true and correct 
one of necessity believes its antipode to be unwise, un- 
patriotic and perhaps dangerous. In such case it be- 
comes just as much a patriotic duty to weaken the hold 
of the policy which he distrusts upon the public mind 
as to instill his own principles upon the rising genera- 
tion, ^o doubt very many of the democratic party, 
perhaps a majority of its members, actually believed 
during all the time it was in the minority that the 
principles of the republican party were inconsistent 
with the future peace and prosperity of the country, 
and so felt that it would not only be unwise but 
unpatriotic to extol the wisdom, integrity, or patriotism 
of its leaders, or admit the possible good effects of 
legislation inspired by it. Because of this they have 



A MAN OF DESTINY. 97 

uniformly credited their adversaries with all conceiv- 
able ills that might supervene their action, and, at 
least by implication, have sought unremittingly to foster 
the idea that wisdom, patriotism, and the guaranties of 
prosperity were in the sole keeping of the democratic 
party. If time compelled the acknowledgment that this 
monopoly was not exclusive, but that some of its 
opponent's acts were good and wise, it was always 
made in the fewest possible words, in the smallest kind 
of type, and in the most unnoticed corner, while the 
mistakes and wrong-doings of their opponents were 
paraded in full-faced characters with displayed headings, 
where he who ran might read. 

Iso weak and fallacious twaddle about "judicial 
fairness " troubled the consciences of this great party. 
That the democracy was in the right was indubitable, 
aphoristic truth to every member of the party, from 
the highest to the lowest. That the republican party 
was Avrong was to them a conclusion equally irrefuta- 
ble, and logically resulting therefrom. To promote 
the supremacy of one and the overthrow of the other 
was, therefore, a patriotic duty. The offer of excuse 
or defense, or the suggestion of possibly favorable or 
extenuating hypotheses, they regarded as the province 
of the party in power and not in any degree incumbent 
on the party in opposition. In other words, the demo- 
cratic party as a party of opposition has acted on the 
principle that its prime duty was to overthrow repub- 
lican ascendency by rendering the course of that party 
obnoxious to the brain and conscience of the land, and 
not to so modify, excuse and justify such action as 
7 



9S A MAN OF DESTINY. 

to incline the country to a farther toleration of its 
authority. 

As a result of this line of action it has not merely 
overthroAvn the policy of the republican party, but has 
induced the country to tolerate and approve the abso- 
lute abandonment and subversion of those principles 
which the instinct of safety as well as the impulse of 
justice had impelled the nation to engraft on our 
fundamental law, by which, in one third of the states 
of the Union, the will of the majority is silenced and 
that of a bold and unscrupulous minoritjL set up in its 
stead. A result so astounding and incomprehensible 
justifies any words of admiration that may be uttered 
of the methods by which it has been achieved. Whether 
instinct or philosophy guided the democratic party in 
its career in opposition, certain it is that no policy was 
ever so well approved by its results and no man ever 
before came to the nominal leadership of a party so 
long and so thoroughly trained to an unquestioning 
support of its own men and measures and unmitigated 
hostility to its opponents. 

Coming freshly into power, with so long a training 
in the tactics of opposition, it is evident that the same 
idea must continue to prevail and that your part}^ will 
occupy itself for a considerable time in efforts to stamp 
out and destroy its already beaten, demoralized, and self- 
abased opponent. The two parties can not at once 
change their legislative and forensic characteristics. 
During perhaps the better part of your administration 
the repubhcan party in congress will continue as they 
have been for a quarter of a century the habitual pro- 



A MAN OF DESTINY. 99 

ponents of new measures ; while the democratic party 
will continue to oppose all that they find themselves 
unable to appropriate with a fair chance of making the 
country believe them the originators. During the 
same period the residuum of republican rule will be 
the favorite prospecting ground for democratic party 
capital. It will occupy itself chiefly in ''gulch mining" 
in the alluvium left by the stream of republican power 
in order to discover whatever there may be which 
ought not to have been done and yet was done under 
republican rule. 

This state of affairs will be peculiarly favorable to 
one of your mental and moral characteristics, as it will 
make it comparatively easy for you to remain neutral 
upon all important issues of the present and utterly 
indifferent upon all matters affecting the future. The 
marvelous capacity for non-achievement which you 
have desplayed in the past, now upon a broader field 
may serve you in good stead and perliaps result in con- 
firming in the minds of others a conviction which no 
marvel of good fortune could strengthen in your own 
mind, that you are indeed a man of destiny to whose 
career tlie rules that govern ordinary humanity were 
never designed to apply. Certain it is, th^it no man 
ever entered upon the discharge of the duties of the 
chief executive with so mau}^ apparently fortuitous in- 
fluences making in his favor, and should you fail nf)t 
merely to conclude 3^our term Avithout widespread dis- 
aster attributable to yowc incapacity, but should you 
even fail to lay the foundation for a well-assured and 
long-continued lease of power by the party whose first 



100 A MAN OF DESTINY. 

success you represent, you will live in history, not as a 
man of destiny whom favoring fortune wafted to phe- 
nomenal success, but as one whom no amount of good 
luck could stimulate to such self-forgetful, reasonable 
exertion and ordinary self-sacrifice as may be necessary 
to take advantage of an unparalleled opportunity. 
Yet every day renders it more and more probable that 
such will be the result. 

It is not likely that you will be able to deprive the 
democratic party of the ascendancy it has won under 
your accidental candidacy, but without a hint of leader- 
ship on your part. This ascendancy is the result of a 
quarter of a century of thoroughly organized and skill- 
fully chrected effort, which even the failure of its first 
beneficiary is not likely to overthrow. It is becoming 
evident to all that, while the democratic party will 
remain in power after the close of your adminst ration, 
you will retire to merited oblivion with the hatred and 
contempt of your party associates and the jeers and 
ridicule of their opponents. Day by day the impres- 
sion grows deeper and stronger with both your political 
friends and foes that no sort of luck can bring ultimate 
success to one so devoid of the better elements of man- 
hood as you are showing yourself to be, and who is at 
the same time so utterly oblivious of the moral and 
intellectual emasculation which a past so overburdened 
with self-absorbed indifference has wrought. Already, 
before your administration has begun, your party is 
looking to the future and counting the days that shall 
elapse before your successor is inaugurated. Already 
they have taken instinctively the measure of your 



A MAN OF DESTINY. 101 

incapacity, and look not to your skill or statesmanship 
to aid them in future struggles, but to the wisdom and 
strength of approved leaders and the inherent weak- 
ness of their demoralized opponents. The triumphal 
progress of Mr. Randall through the south, which was 
gall and wormwood to your envious apprehension ; the 
fact that the leaders of your party, after vain attempts 
to secure your conizdence, meeting only suspicion, re- 
buffs, impudent assertion and arrogant coldness, have 
ceased to concern themselves about your plans and 
purposes ; and the still further ftlct that you have 
already begun to manifest an inclination to reward 
those followers who were more anxious to screen your 
moral obliquities than to advance the interests of the 
party or promote your success upon public grounds — 
all these facts are significant of a determination on 
the part of your party friends neither to submit to 
your personal dictation nor permit your selfish inca- 
pacity to ruin their future prospects. In view of these 
things it seems altogether probable that your mission 
in history will be one for which you are superlatively 
well fitted — to demonstrate beyond question that man- 
hood and power are absolutely necessary to transform 
"luck" into "destiny." 

Yours respectfully, 
New York, January 22, 1885. SiVA. 



ISTo. YIII. 
"DIMIOTMIS 1\0^ CUKAT LEX." 

To Grover Cleveland, President-Elect : 

3Iy Dear Sir, — In these letters I have said little 
about myself. I understand that it is of you and nat 
of me that the American people desire to learn. I am 
nothing — one of the many — a grain of sand upon the 
sea-shore. Beyond the limits of a happy home, outside 
of a little circle of devoted friends, 1 am almost as 
unknown as you were before the democratic party in 
its dire extremity exhumed you from a questionable 
obscurity to place you in the van of their conglomerate 
hosts. I am only an atom of the national life. You 
are one chosen out of millions as a type of the whole. 

The underlying principle of republican government 
is that the best and bravest, the strongest and purest, 
are chosen for the most exalted and responsible stations. 
Because of this, the world looks upon the president of 
the United States as the embodiment of those peculiar 
attributes which the American people especially delight 
to honor. By virtue of your election, therefore, you 
have become, for the time being, the recognized expo- 
nent of American manhood, patriotism and virtue. It 
is only because of this accidental eminence that you 
have become worthy of "one moment of the busy 
world's attention." Whether you are a true and veri- 

102 



A MAN OF DESTINY. . 103 

table type or but a counterfeit presentment is a question 
of prime importance to every one who feels a thrill of 
pardonable pride in the name American. 

It has been intimated that in truthfully portraying 
the mental and moral lineaments of the president-elect 
I am transcending the privilege of the citizen and ig- 
noring the primal duty of the patriot, and bringing 
odium upon our national institutions. We are told that 
as the president of the United States you are of right 
entitled to demand the respect and confidence of the 
people, and that our national honor requires that the 
presidential toga should hide from all eyes the personal 
infirmities of the wearer. This is a new form of an an- 
cient dogma. Under the pretense of shielding the na- 
tional honor the vices of kings and their counselors 
have been hidden from public gaze. Fortunately for 
the honor of American manhood, our Anglo-Saxon the- 
ory of government has long since distinctly separated 
the office from the individual and unmistakably marked 
the difference between the person of the sovereign and 
the sanctity of the throne. Under our system, how- 
ever, even this distinction of our inherited common 
law is unnecessary. The presidency is merely an acci- 
dent of the citizen's life. It attaches to yours to-day, 
and may pertain to mine to-morrow. It can add noth- 
ing to his merits, and he can detract nothing from its 
dignity. Officially he is not a ruler, but only the rec- 
ognized representative of the nation's power. Individ- 
ually he is presumed to represent the best elements of 
the nation's life. In his official capacity he is entitled 
to obedience and respect within the limits of his con- 



104 A MAN OF DESTINY. 

stitutional authority. There the duty of the patriot 
ends, and the right of the citizen begins. 

For myself, I yield to none in honor for the dignity 
of that high office. Whatever in my life is worthy of 
remembrance is inseparably linked with the struggle 
to preserve the nationality which it represents. I gave 
to that cause a widow's mite — all that I had or hoped 
to be. It was not much. I take no credit to myself 
because of it. I only claim to have offered it gladly 
and thereby to have attested beyond the power of any 
man that lives or shall live to controvert the sincerity 
of my devotion to the nation's honor and the glory of 
that people whose official head is the president. I have 
for her flag that jealous love which only he can know 
who has \vatched its stars amid the roar of battle and 
seen its stripes soiled with the shame of defeat as well 
as blazoned with the glare of victory. I never pass 
beneath its shadow without respectful salutation to the 
power it symbolizes. There is little in my life of 
which any man would feel inclined to boast ; but in 
love for our common country, pride in her fair name, 
and sincere desire for her prosperity, welfare and glory 
the proudest of her sons cannot outdo me. If I know 
anything of myself I can truthfully say that rather 
than smirch with a single word the dignity of that 
high office you are soon to fill, I would cheerfully sac- 
rifice the hand that pens these words. As the repre- 
sentative of national authority, none will more readily 
obey your behest, or show themselves quicker to resent 
affront to jour official dignity. Old as I am, and en- 
feebled by wounds and the nameless hardships falling 



A MAN OF DESTINY. 105 

to the lot of those who tasted the hospitality of the 
foe, I would not seek a substitute to stand for me 
between your life and an enemy's assault. 

With such humble reverence for the position you are 
about to assume, such loyal devotion to the nationality 
you represent, I conceive that the duty of the citizen 
is complete. The personality of him who bears the 
presidential title remains unchanged, and the patriot 
may bow in ready acknowledgement of official dignity, 
yet still regard with supreme contempt the person of 
the agent, and properly proclaim that 4 

" The hand of Douglas is his own, 
And never shall, in friendly grasp. 
The hand of such as Marmion clasp." 

Nay, more, sir ; the very eminence of the position 
not only invites animadversion, but demands at the 
hands of every patriot the most unrelenting scrutiny 
of the life and character of its occupant. The subject 
may perhaps excuse himself for silence with regard to 
the foibles of the king, but the citizen who fails to 
protest when the patriotism, manhood, and parity of 
the country are burlesqued rather than represented in 
the person of her chief executive, becomes a party to 
his own debasement. It is not the duty of a patriot to 
sit quietly by and see that position which is recognized 
throughout the civilized world as typical of American 
hfe occupied by one about whom it fits so loosely that 
liis dearest friends can only beg that the glory of his 
exalted position shall serve as a screen from popular 
contempt. Though he be the least and least worthy 
among all the fifty millions of her sons, it is not only 



106 A MAN OF DESTINY. 

the inalierxable right, but the imperative duty of every 
one who feels the character and personahty of the chief 
magistrate to be not merely a counterfeit presentment 
of American manhood, but an aifront to the intelli- 
gence, patriotic devotion, and moral instincts of the 
American people, to enter his protest against such 
spurious types. I speak not for myself alone, but for 
all those, our fellow-citizens, of whom you stand be- 
fore the world as the accepted and approved repre- 
sentative. As a brave people we have a right to show 
our resentment when one who shirked a soldier's duty 
is put forth as the exemplar of American courage. A 
people whose patriotism has shown itself to be unsur- 
passed in the world's history would be unworthy of 
such commendation if they did not manifest a right- 
eous indignation at being typified to the world by one 
who never lisped a patriotic aspiration until, when 
forty years old or upward, the lust of office forced 
from his unaccustomed lips some strangely distorted 
civic aphorisms. The man who believes and glories in 
the virtue and purity of the American people has not 
only a right, but it is his bounden duty, to point out to 
^ the Avorld the canker-spots of that life which is falsely 
proclaimed the noblest and sweetest product of j^our 
nationality and the veritable exponent of our free in- 
stitutions. 

There are those among our political opponents, as 
well as your own party friends, who strenuously insist 
that pity for your irresponsil)ility and the magnitude 
and difficulty of the task before you should induce the 
American people to cast the mantle of charity over 



A MAN OF DESTINY. 107 

your infirmities, and look forward to your administra- 
tion with a roseate hope that out of evil may spring an 
abundant harvest of good. " Do men gather grapes of 
thorns, or figs of thistles ? " Having planted thorns 
and sowed the seeds of thistles, shall we expect a harvest 
of wholesome fruits ? 

One of your most earnest supporters recently said 
in an appeal, evidently wrung from his lips by pity for 
your Aveakness : 

" It is not his fault that he ^vas elected president of 
the United States." 

Unfortunately this is true. It was not your fault — • 
only your luck and the countr3^'s misfortune. As the 
president-elect you are only a consequence of pre-exist- 
ent facts. You are entitled to no more credit and 
should receive no more blame for this result than an 
egf^ for the color- of the chick that bursts from its shell. 
You performed no act, exerted no influences, consti- 
tuted no element of the power by which your exalta- 
tion was achieved. The niael storm of political passion, 
greed, and hate thrust you into prominence as the 
representative of an idea, an aspiration, a party's hope — 
success. Be^^ond that one idea you represent nothing, 
and counted for nothing in the conflict of parties. It 
is because you are the creature of an unholy alliance 
that American manhood is libeled in the fact of your 
preferment. 

It is not any Avant of respect for the position you 
are to occupy, nor any lack of patriotic desire that its 
duties should be faithfully and honorably discharged, 
nor — as some of your oleaginous confidants have 



108 A MAN OF DESTINY. 

averred — from any personal ill-will that has led me to 
indite these letters, or to attempt the vivisection of 
your mental and moral nature. I understand full well 
that even you can do little to debase the position you 
are about to assume. I believe you can work no serious 
harm to the body politic either by sins of omission or 
commission. Whether your occupancy of the presiden- 
tial chair shall act upon the public mind as a stimulus 
to patriotic devotion or an emetic which shall cause the 
nation to spew out evil, is, in the ultimate, a matter of 
very little consequence. Whether the people shall 
continue to select the recognized exponents of Ameri- 
can life from the baser and meaner of its constituent 
types or not, is a vastly more important question. 

If you are a true type of American life, it is high 
time that we had a new ideal. If the ultimate out- 
come of free institutions in America is to be the eleva- 
tion of sucli as you to the highest offices in the people's 
gift — if neither eloquence nor statesmanship, intel- 
lectual eminence nor patriotic devotion, public service 
nor private virtue, are necessary to secure the^suffrages 
of a free people, then indeed is it time we should be 
lashed with a scorpion whip to apprehend the depth of 
our degeneracy. To awaken in the hearts of the Amer- 
ican people a sense of shame for seeming to have pro- 
claimed you the standard of mental power and moral 
worth in the republic, there seemed to be no way, ex- 
cept to show them unmistakabl}?' the real character and 
actual dimensions of the man they had heedlessly ex- 
alted to the highest place and indorsed as a genuine 
sample of the nation's best. 



A MAN OF DESTINY. 109 

It may seem harsh. You deem it malign. Your most 
trusted henchman has denominated it "treacherous 
and mean," that I should truthfully portray your men- 
tal and moral lineaments. Some who are not your 
political friends insist that my letters fall within the 
constitutional inhibition of cruel and unusual punish- 
ments. One who writes to stay my hand declares 
"that the American people are already ashamed" of 
having chosen you to be the president of the republic, 
and asks me to pity your weakness and helplessness. 

"Pity thee! Soldo. 
I pity the dumb victim at the altar, 
But does the robed priest for his pity falter?" 

I pity you as I do the snarling scavenger of the 
desert sands, because he is not fitted for nobler things. 
I pity you standing before the world as the exemplar 
of the American people, as I would pity a Lilliputian 
leper put forward as a representative and type of the 
unlettered giants of B'robdingnag. I pity you as an 
inert instrument of an unholy combination of evil pur- 
poses — the victim of a party's greed for power and of 
a faction's blood-stained strength. I pity you as one 
that worships the American name and glories in the 
majesty of a free people must pity one w^ho can look 
upon the past that surrounded your j^oung manhood 
and feel that it contains no evidence of patriotic im- 
pulse or self -forgetful ardor. I pity you, sir, but I pity 
a thousand times more the American people whose 
patriotic devotion, intellectual acumen and moral worth 
must for a time be measured by the world upon a 



110 A MAN OF DESTINY. 

scale on which your life marks the highest attainable 
excellence. 

I am not surprised that even your o^Yn partisans are 
ashamed of their act in choosing you to be the chief 
magistrate of the republic. How could it be otherwise 
when they come to take the measure of your manliood 
and think of those over whose heads you were exalted 
to powers How could it be otherwise when, unless 
your personal interests were at stake, you were as 
indifferent to the success of your party as you were 
unmoved by the nation's peril in the hour of her mortal 
agony ? Can you wonder that the tough old copper- 
heads who plotted with Yallandigham, the stout- 
hearted confederates who fought with Lee, or even the 
mercenary patriots who "leaped the bounty," should 
look with scorn upon the able-bodied youug Sybarite 
who had neither patriotism enough to fight, nor cour- 
age enough to protest; who offered to the countrj^ a 
convicted felon as a substitute and equivalent of him- 
self upon the battlefield ; who was alike unmoved by 
victory or defeat, and who coolly regulated his illicit 
pleasures with a strict regard to cost ? Why sliould not 
the very thief who performed the services you should 
have discharged, who faced the dangers which you 
shirked, who suffered the pains you should have 
endured — why should he not be ashamed when he sees 
you who skulked in his shadow when the glare of 
battle shone upon him, set before the world as an 
exemplar even of his poor, shattered manhood? 

It is now too late to amend the record. Luck can- 
not obliterate the testimony you have engrossed there- 



A MAN OF DESTINY. Ill 

in against yourself. 'No amount of good fortune can 
make one so lacking in the essential elements of man- 
hood a fair type of American life. The past has put 
the mint-mark of actual value upon your being, Avliich 
no future can erase and no exalted station hide from 
a world that nails the counterfeit with unerring cer- 
tainty. " Luck," as you are beginning to learn, is not 
all sweetness, and destiny means something more than 
unearned preferment. When the country summoned 
you to the soldier's post of honor and peril, j^ou pro- 
cured a substitute. In the conflict where fame is won 
and shame avoided there is no substitution. There 
every man must answer to his own name and be graded 
on his merits. You have one marvelously glorious 
chance for immortality. Whether you will perceive 
your opportunity and convert your " luck" into destiny 
is a question that a few more days will answer. 

Yours respectfully, 
New York, January 39, 1885. SiVA. 



No. IX. 
KEQUIESCAT m PACE. 

To Groyer Cleveland, President-Elect : 

3Iy Dear Si?\ — It is time for the historian of the 
republican party to begin his work. For one-fourth of 
a century, less one year, it has controlled the course 
and character of the government. It was the out- 
growth of the mightiest intellectual struggle that ever 
colored the life of a free people. Its six presidential 
quadrenniates embrace the most important events in 
the life of the republic, and constitute an era in the 
history of popular government infinitely more impor- 
tant than any precedent century. 

The epoch of the American revolution had for its mo- 
tive, the establishment of a people's collective right to 
self-government. It is true that the declaration of in- 
dependence contained a broader statement of individ- 
ual rights than had ever before found place in the 
official utterances of any sovereign power. That aver- 
ment, however, was argumentative in its character, 
and was not really put in issue in the struggle between 
the mother country and the colonies. The questions 
decided by that struggle did not pertain to the rights 
of man as an individual, nor in any material degree af- 
fect them. This conflict determined simply the rights 
of the American colonies, as organized communities, to 
self-government as against the claim of Great Britain 

113 



A MAN OF DESTINY. 113 

to tlieir ultimate control. This was the first epoch of 
our national history. 

The next fifty years were occupied mainly in devel- 
oping, defining, and establishing the hmits of this newly 
created national organism, to the determination of its 
relations to foreign nations, the constituent repabhcs, 
and the aboriginal inliabitants of our territory. For a 
third of a century our foreign entanglements were al- 
most continuous, and more than onc3 seriously threat- 
ened our national existence. Even before our national 
power had become securely established, the conflict be- 
tween state and federal authority had more than once 
threatened the national peace, having resulted in or- 
ganized armed resistance to federal power not less 
tlian three times during the first half century. This 
Avas the era of solidification. 

Long before the conclusion of this epoch the question 
of individual right in its relations to the national gov- 
ernment began to obtrude itself and complicate the 
previously considered question of the relations between 
the general government and the individual states. In 
the conflict between the original republican party and 
its successor, the democratic party, on the one side, and 
their opponent, the federal party, and its successor, the 
whigs, upon the other, the former had stood for the 
rights of tlie states as independent, sovereign powers 
and against the general government as a consociation 
of individuals rather than a confederation of constit- 
uent communities. The latter had maintained the su- 
premacy of the national organism over that of the 
subordinate commonwealths, basing their construction 
8 



114 A MAN OF DESTINY. 

upon the initial declaration of the constitution, " We, 
the people of the United States." 

When the question of individual rights came at 
lengtli to overleap the boundaries of the states and in 
various forms to enter the arena of national politics, 
the democratic party, having already espoused the 
cause of the state as against the general government, 
very naturally, if not exactly logically, extended its 
championship of state rights as against the individual. 
The whig part}^, on the other hand, having contem- 
plated no such issue, and regarding the conflict between 
the integral and confederated ideas as a theoretical 
rather than a substantial difference, and having been, 
from the first, accused by their opponents of a desire 
to annihilate the states as independent existences and 
centralize the entire government, they no sooner saw 
the effort made to extend their principles to the affirm- 
ation of individual right as against the dictum of the 
separate states than they at once began to recede from 
the position which they had held, and to aver that 
although the sovereign power of the United States 
rested ultimately in the people inhabiting the several 
states and not in the state organizations themselves, 
yet the general government had no right or authority 
to define, establish or protect the rights of its indi- 
vidual components as against the power of the several 
states themselves or the individual or collective action 
of the citizens thereof. 

While thus the democratic party continued in exist- 
ence with a certain consistent basis of fundamental 
ideas, the whig party perished by a process of natural 



A MAN OF DESTINY. 115 

and irresistible disintegration. While it remained the 
opponent of the democratic idea and asserted the su- 
premacy of the general government over the individ- 
ual states, it counted very naturally among its sup- 
porters many thousands of those who had already 
gone beyond its self-imposed hmitations. They had 
instinctively anticipated the time, which afterward be- 
came so clearly inevitable, when the idea of national 
supremacy should override the limits of state author- 
ity, not merely for the preservation of national power, 
but for the assertion and maintenance of the univer- 
sality of that great truth Avhich had from the first un- 
derlain our national life, the equality of human right. 
The distinction between " We the people " as the com- 
ponent elements of national power and "We the 
people" as petitioners for and recipients of national 
protection, though it may possibly be clear enough to 
minds accustomed to political casuistry, was too dim 
and slight to retain its hold upon the minds of the 
people. The republican party came into existence as 
the representative of this new phase of popular 
thought, the equal rights of individuals, so far as the 
dominion and control of the general government ex- 
tended. It did not profess to advocate interference 
with slavery in the states in which it already existed, 
but it openly declared its purpose to prevent the exten- 
sion of that institution to the unorganized territory of 
the United States, to eradicate it from the District of 
Columbia, to drive it from all forts and arsenals di- 
rectly under the control of the United States by ces- 
sion from the various states, and to prevent the use of 



11 G A MAN OF DESTINY. 

national power to override the authority of the several 
free states in order to assert the rights of the south- 
ern states against individuals who had evaded their 
power and escaped beyond their jurisdiction. 

These doctrines marked the beginning of the third 
epoch of the national life. The period of transition — 
the state of chaos out of which it eventually arose — 
may be said to have extended through three presiden- 
tial quadrenniates. The idea first showed itself as a 
potential factor in national politics in the election of 
1818, and assumed definite and permanent shape in the 
organization and establisliment of the republican party 
in the campaign of 1856. From the very first hour of 
its existence the central idea of this party has been the 
assertion of equal right and privilege as the common 
inheritance of man Avithout distinction of race or color, 
because of the fact of national citizenship. The steps 
in this struggle by which this purpose was achieved 
need not be recounted. I only refer to these funda- 
mental characteristics because some of the details of 
its history were of such striking and marvelous charac- 
ter that the mind is not apt to be led away from the 
consideration of the underlying cause to the contem- 
plation of startling and overwhelming results. 

The conflict which was precipitated by the accession 
of the republican party to power was perhaps the 
most unlooked-for and amazing in its character, con- 
comitants, and consequences that the world has ever 
known. It was the first test upon any considerable 
scale of the capacity of free government for self-pre- 
servation and its adaptability to new and startling 



A MAN OF DESTINY. 



117 



phases of development. Perhaps no nation was ever 
less fitted for the conflict of arms than what was left 
of the American Union after tlie "solid south" of 
1861 had assumed a belligerent attitude. Not only was 
there an almost entire absence of mihtary and naval ar- 
maments, but their habits of life and peculiarities of 
intellect and temper seemed to have thoroughly un- 
fitted the people of the north for an undertaking such 
as that which confronted them. Perhaps never in the 
previous histoi-y of the world had a rebellion of like 
extent and witli similar organic advantages been sup- 
pressed under any form of government. That a re- 
pubUc should show itself capable, jiot merely of 
repressing internal discord, but of undertaking and 
accomplishing such a task, is of itself glory enough 
to have immortalized the administration of any party, 
and thoroughly to justify the declaration that the epoch 
of its power is the most remarkable in the history of 
the country. 

The overthrow of the rebellion, although the most 
notable feat of arms, all things considered, that the 
century has witnessed, and altliough it must be re- 
garded through all time as the climacteric test of a 
republic to protect itself even against the most over- 
whelming odds, is hardly worthy of consideration in 
comparison with some of the attendant circumstances 
and resulting consequences of this struggle. When 
the conflict began the general government had an 
empty treasury, a skeleton army, and a dismantled 
navy!^ x\s if by magic its treasury was filled to over- 
flowing. Soldiers sprang out of the soil as if the land 



118 A MAN OF DESTINY. 

had been thickly sown with dragon's teeth, l^ew and 
w^onderful armaments were fashioned betwixt the goinp- 
down of the sun and the rising thereof. Forge and 
furnace yielded day by day new marvels of destructive 
art. An army outnumbering the foe at all points 
thronged the borders of the rebellious territory, threat- 
ening every vital point. An improvised navy swarmed 
along the hostile shores, prohibiting ingress and egress. 
This power of creating an effective army almost upon 
the instant, of beating plowshares and pruning-hooks 
into swords, of converting peaceful flotilla into effect- 
ive vessels of war, of defying the world's distrust by un- 
paralleled manifestations of public confldence— these 
facts were in themselves sufficient to unsettle the mon- 
archical theories of the past and teach the nations of the 
earth that the American Republic does not rely for self- 
preservation upon any adventitious surroundings. For 
the first time we stood before the world, at the conclu- 
sion of that struggle, as a people thoroughly capable, 
not merely of defending ourselves but of punishing 
any enemy that might presume to awaken our dis- 
pleasure. It was not so much a desire for peace and 
amity or any sudden sentimental conviction of the jus- 
tice and propriety of adjudication by an international 
tribunal that made England willing to submit the ques- 
tions that had arisen between herself and the United 
States to arbitration at Geneva. AYhatever may be 
said of our kinsman across the sea, one thing is certain, 
that John Bull had never before, and would not then 
have submitted to a demand made against him to ar- 
bitration, unless confident that it would be overbalanced 



A MAN OF DESTINY. 119 

and swallo\Yed up by a counterclaim, if it had not been 
for a profound conviction on the part of the Enghsh 
people that a conflict with the United States would in 
all probability result in the loss of their American col- 
onies and the permanent humiliation of the power of 
Great Britain. The fact is that England negotiated 
simply because she dared not fight. To tlie surprise 
of all the world, it was found that hardly had Lee sur- 
rendered at Appomattox before the soldiers of both 
armies were panting for a conflict with some foreign 
foe. Out of her crucial struggle the American nation 
had come a thousand times stronger in the power of 
offense and defense than it had ever been before in the 
eyes of the world. 

Even this amazing result, however, was hardly so 
surprising as the fact that during the whole period of 
this conflict public antl private enterprises multipled 
with unparalleled rapidity. All forms of industry 
showed an amazingly enhanced production. While 
the government was carrying on the war at the ex- 
penditure of 820,000,000 a week, the business of the 
country was increasing and expanding at a rate 
enabling it to meet this increased expenditure without 
any perceptible enhancement of the burden of taxation. 
The most gigantic railroad enterprise that the world 
had ever known went steadily on during the months of 
strife. The g-reat northwest o^ave one-third of its best and 
bravest to the conflict of arms, but those who remained 
were so inspired by the marvelous spirit of the times 
that no industry flagged, no great undertaking was left 
unperformed, no scheme of development that had 



120 A MAN OF DESTINY. 

before seemed possible was left unfulfilled, and many 
which the wildest dreamers of the past would have 
pronounced chimerical, became accomplished facts 
under the impetus of an inspiration that thrilled the 
hearts of the whole people and made every man and 
woman count almost a score in the nation's power of 
achievement. I do not expect you to realize the magni- 
tude of this fact. One Avho lived through this marvel- 
ous period without feeling so much as an extra heart 
throb, because of the great events that were occuring 
before and about him, cannot be expected to appreciate 
their results. They were nothing to you because they 
did not affect the sluggish current of your life ; but 
they were much to the world, because the world's life 
will be flexed and shaped for centuries by their influ- 
ences. 

Even more amazing than these physical marvels per- 
haps was the fact that, wdien the war ended, there 
came no serious tumult, and no sudden and disastrous 
financial shock. The hosts of war melted away and 
were lost to sight amid peaceful millions. The nation 
which had poured forth treasure like water for the 
maintenance of its power, shrank not from the harder 
task of liquidating, in time of peace, the obligations 
which a patriotic enthusiasm had lightly incurred. The 
productive capacity of the country has more than kept 
pace with the demands upon its treasury, so that now^, 
only a score of years after the close of the struggle, 
perhaps an actual moiety of the debt thus contracted 
has been discharged, while in the meantime the expend- 
itures of the government for internal improvements, for 



A MAN OF DESTINY. 121 

increasing the facilities for commercial intercourse, and 
for still further development of our western territories, 
for increased effectiveness of its civil service, for public 
buildings and public works, has been multiplied a hun- 
dred-fold. Yet so wise, successful, and unmatched in 
history has been the administration of our affairs, so 
marvelous is the elastic recuperative power of a free 
people, that, with all this increase of burdens and mul- 
tiplication of expenditures, the treasury groans beneath 
the weight of a surplus garnered in advance of neces- 
sity and awaiting the maturity of its obligations, such 
as was never e([ualed in the financial histor}^ of the 
world. Without hardship, almost without murmur- 
ings, these wonderful things have been achieved by a 
nation whose bare existence the world counted but an 
accident, and at whose capacity for presei ving even the 
integrity of its own territory, the whole world incred- 
ulously jeered on that dark day wdien the party whose 
overthrow has resulted in your exaltation, distrusting 
themselves, but relying upon the right, and manfully 
determined to do all that lay within the power of man 
to do, under the guidance of that noblest of immortals, 
Abraham Lincoln, set out to perform the tasks devolv- 
ing upon them, as he reverently said, " as God gives us 
to know the right." 

All of these marvels were as naught, however, in 
comparison with one sublime achievement which 
crowned and overtopped them all. Words cannot 
paint its w^ondrous character. Imagination is power- 
less to depict its consequences. A people outnum- 
bering: our whole nation in the hour of its birth were 



122 A MAN OF DESTINY. 

transformed from slaves into free men, lifted from 
nothingness to power, taken from the realm of hope- 
less chattelism and set before the golden gate of bound- 
less opportunity. This miracle is made all the more 
marvelous by the fact that these four millions of bond- 
men thus in an instant clothed with the privileges and 
powers of the freeman, were of another distinct and 
therefore despised race. It was not the mere fact of 
the loosening of the slave's fetters, wonderful as that 
was, that made American emancipation the most mar- 
velous political event recorded in the world's history. 
It was the exhibition of undoubted and unquestioning 
confidence in the underlying principles upon which our 
republic is based — the acceptance as an indubitable 
truth of the unimpeachable verity of the nation's 
initial declaration tliat " all men are created equal," 
and the unshrinking assertion tliat inalienable right 
was not limited or modified by the fact of race, color, 
or even the accident of a previous condition of servitude. 
Monarchs have freed their serfs ; nobles have espoused 
the cause of the people ; peasants have been made the 
peers of the proudest in other lands and at other times. 
Runnymede was made immortal by the barons, who, 
in order to weaken a tyrant's power and intrench 
themselves securely in their own privileges, compelled 
him to ag-ree to hold inviolable the fundamental rio;hts 
of Englishmen. Our fathers won imperishable renown 
by declaring that all men were entitled to the rights 
which they claimed themselves, although with the first 
breath of national life they weakly and inconsistently 
denied that the rights they had so vauntingly asserted 



A MAN OF DESTINY. 123 

for " all men " were any part of the inheritance of the 
slave or in anj'- degree attached to any race or people, 
saving and except that branch of the human family 
known as the Caucasian. It was reserved for the 
American people, under the guidance of the republican 
party, for the first time in the world's history to wel- 
come to the plane of personal privilege and political 
power which they themselves occupied, the millions of 
a despised, outcast, and down-trodden people— to ex- 
emplify their unwavering confidence and ineradicable 
belief in the truth of that glorious doctrine which the 
fathers had proclaimed but dared not put in practice. 

This, in brief, is the record of the republican party, 
the dominating and inspiring force of the climacteric 
epoch of American history, and of the world's devel- 
opment. It is ended. Like its great leader it has per- 
ished at the zenith of its fame. We, who stood beside 
its cradle, watch now beside its bier — not looking for 
its resurrection, but exulting in its glory. I am not 
one of those who believe that it will be raised in pris- 
tine beauty to-morrow. I have studied too carefully 
the elements of that party which has at length 
achieved success to believe that it will be soon or 
easily deposed from the seats of national power. I 
have noted too accurately the constituent elements of 
the republican party to believe that it will ever again 
control the government until a crisis shall arise as ter- 
rible as that which called it into being and summon its 
spirit again to save the republic from destruction. 

Over tlie downfall of this great party you weakly 
and foolishly exult. To you its history means noth- 



124 A MAN OF DESTINY. 

ing. To you it was merely a factor in the game of 
politics. It represented nothing to your mind beyond 
the mere success of its candidates. You gleefully de- 
clare that you have " dug the grave of the repubhcan 
party." Be not deceived, my dear sir, the tomb by 
which you stand is but a cenotaph. The life you 
fondly imagine it enshrines is set eternally amid the 
stars. You indeed stand beside a tomb — you and that 
malignant foe of everything that made for the na- 
tion's glory, which the republican party held sacred 
above all things, your fit though manlier associate — 
one at the head, the other at the foot — dull stones 
that mark the close of the most glorious epoch in his- 
tory. It is ended. Its marvelous story is complete. 
You are but the period that marks its conclusion. 

Yours respectfully. 
New York, February 4, 1885. • Siva. 



No. X. 

"WHAT IIAMMEES WEUjS^G, WHAT A:N'YILS 
BEATT' 

To Groyer Clevelaxd, Presiclent-Elect : 

J/y Dea?' Sir, — It is a strange fact that the excel- 
lencies of the republican party and the short-comings 
of the democracy have alike contributed to that luck 
which you are delighted to call destiny. It is not 
merely a case in Avhich "extremes meet," but one in 
Avhich the most positive and conflicting elements of our 
national life have not only joined hands to promote 
the fortunes of its most neutral exponent, but seem 
destined to continue their co-operation to the point of 
making a life of self-absorbed inertness, the phenom- 
enal success of an age more fertile in self-sacrifice and 
richer in grand achievements than any the world has 
heretofore known. 

This would seem to be the very acme of paradox, but 
it is really no more startling than the undeniable fact 
that the excellence of the republican party is a chief 
source of its weakness ; that the good it has achieved 
handicaps it for the future, and that the very worst 
features of the unscrupulous party whose servant and 
creature you are constitute its surest guaranty of con- 
tinued power. The fact is undeniable that during the 
past twenty-four years the republican party has been 
the source and instrument of all good and valorous 

125 



126 A MAN OF DESTINY. 

achievement. So, too, it cannot be denied that the 
dangerous, malignant, and retrogressive forces of the 
countr\^, during that time, have been more or less 
compactly arrayed in opposition to it, and are now 
with sui'prising unanimity embraced within the demo- 
cratic party. While a considerable minority of those 
who foug-ht for the overthrow of the rebellion are to 
be found in the ranks of the democracy, it is a singu- 
lar fact that hardly an appreciable fraction of those 
who voluntarily supported the confederacy are to be 
found among the republicans. Probably not a hun- 
dredth part of one per cent of the ex-confederates have 
ever been anything but the most inveterate opponents 
of the republican party — its purposes and principles — 
whether on the field of battle or at the ballot-box. 

As the republican party has justly been extolled by 
the lovers of liberty as the representative and embod- 
iment of those ideas which overwhelmed rebellion and 
annihilated slavery, so, too, it has 'been hated with un- 
ceasing bitterness by the friends of slavery and the 
supporters of rebellion because it destroyed the one 
and overthrew the other. Wherever slavery left its 
almost ineradicable stamp upon the mental and moral 
life of the people, there we find all its ancient forces 
still the virulent opponents of the party which rep- 
resented its essentially antagonistic principle. The 
same is true of the great mass of the illiterate, foreign- 
born, poor and vicious populations of our great north- 
ern cities. Almost without possibility of mistake, a 
stranger in any one of them could designate by inspec- 
tion of the locality the strong democratic wards and pre- 



A MAN OF DESTINY. 127 

cincts. The repliblican party no doubt has some of all 
these classes within its ranks, and of late seems to have 
been making strenuous efforts to increase their num- 
bers. Despite this fact, there is no denying the conclu- 
sion that of the chronic, debauched, and unaspiring 
poor ; of the habitually vicious and depraved ; of the 
illiterate and ignorant ; of inebriates and profligates in 
all the great cities of the north, a vast majority belong 
to the democratic party and constitute its most reliable 
element. All this is nothing new in our history. Slav- 
ery always allied itself with ignorance and vice. The 
slums of New York were by natural selection and 
moral affinity the voluntary guardians and protectors 
of the barracoons of New Orleans. The only thing 
that is at all surprising about the matter is that the 
time has come again in our history when one party is 
weak hecause its record is instinct with the struggle for 
liberty ; and another is strong because in all its history 
there is not a single page devoted to the promotion of 
the horizon of individual right nor a single woi'd con- 
demnatory of human chattelism or its logical result — 
the great rebellion. 

The constitution and character of the republican 
party have been as anomalous as its career. In its very 
inception it was a rebellion, not only against all other 
political creeds, but also against all accepted political 
methods. 

It was the most amazing piece of political conglom- 
erate which the histor}^ of parties reveals. It had at 
first no politicians in it. Its differential idea had been 
gathering strength in the popular mind for a score of 



128 A MAN OF DESTINY. 

years. Neither party would give it lodgment or coun- 
tenance, though both had used it for their own ad- 
vantage. The great body of the whigs no doubt sym- 
pathized with the purpose of tlie new organization, but 
dreaded to manifest their sympathy lest they should 
be accused of disloyalty to the constitution. So ob- 
scure was its birth and baptism that of the half dozen 
claimants for the honor of its paternity not one of 
them had more than a very limited local reputation. 
The man having the best authenticated claim to having 
organized the first bod}^ of voters under this name, 
and with substantially the principles on which the 
party was based, lives to-day almost unknown beyond 
the limits of a country village. 

'Not only was the new^ party looked upon with dis- 
favor by political leaders, but its own rank and file re- 
garded with distrust nearly all the prominent men and 
active workers of the old parties. New men were 
thrust forward with unexampled rapidity — men who, 
if not experienced in politics, w^ere thoroughly trusted. 
The people took charge of the new machine and ran it 
in their own way and at their own rate of speed. Both 
parties had used and betrayed, and stood ready to use 
and betray again. This made the rank and file dis- 
trustful of leadership, but anxious to labor and obey. 
The party eschewed politicians and chose its leaders 
from those Avho showed a willingness to be " the serv- 
ant of servants" to their brethren. 

It was anomalous, also, in the contrariety of its ele- 
ments. It embraced a vast preponderance of the active, 
aggressive and progressive thought of that day. The 



A MAN OF DESTINY. 129 

extremes of political faith were found within its ranks, 
whigs and democrats ; federalists and states-rights the- 
orists; protectionists and free-traders. It contained 
the better part of the intelligence, progressive energy, 
and political independence of the northern people. 
They were banded together b}^ the one common idea 
that whatever might be done must be done to restrain, 
and eventually to eradicate, American slavery. Of 
party discipline there was not a trace ; but there was 
an instant and universal subordination of all other 
political purposes to the promotion of an " irrepressible 
conflict," which most of its members, no doubt, supposed 
it would require generations, if not centuries, to decide. 
This mass of strangely diverse attributes was fused and 
welded into the semblance of homogeneity by the heat 
and hammering of rebellion, but the motive of its 
atoms was not materially changed. Little by little 
since the close of that conflict it has been losing its 
coherency and power. The party that was irresistible 
in its rebellion against old political methods has never 
submitted kindly to leadership and dictation. As long 
as the belief was universal that the struggle between 
that party and its opponents was a conflict for the 
liberty of the slave or the equality and security of the 
freedman, the republican phalanx was impenetrable. 
Behind it stood the intelligence and conscience of the 
north, willing to subordinate to that end all other 
political considerations. Just as soon as these things 
were achieved, or declared to be achieved, the members 
of tlie party began to feel as if their term of enlistment 
had expired, and they were at liberty to follDw their 



130 A MAN OF DESTINY. 

preferences and indulge in political vagaries without 
disloyalty to the principles which had animated them 
as republicans. They think that their very faithfulness 
of service should entitle them to an honorable discharge, 
and that they should be allowed to re-enlist at -wiieir 
pleasure. 

Another source of present weakness is the variety 
and splendor of the party's achievements. Men who 
look upon the events of the past quarter of a century 
think there is no limit to the possibilities of accom- 
plishment. They demand that ever}^ day shall be the 
equivalent of a former decade in achievement. A 
fiery zeal that cannot brook delay possesses certain ele- 
ments of the party. They have not patience to let the 
mortar set in the foundation walls before putting in 
place the cap-stone. They have come to despise time 
as an element of political growth or regeneration and 
to regard the enactment of a statute as the end of the 
law — the accomplishment of all desired results. Be- 
cause of this we find among the most active and enthu- 
siastic of its early followers — among those who would 
have been quite content to have seen as the sole result 
of twenty years of struggle, slavery excluded from the 
territories and the District of Columbia — very many to 
whom all the miracles of its past are but as apples of 
Sodom, because something which seems to them to 
have been possible has not been achieved. Among the 
bitterest of its foes are those whose fame has been 
achieved in its own service. The basis of their oppo- 
sition usually lies not in any charge of failure to 
achieve great things, not in any dissent from its well- 



A MAN OF DESTINY. 131 

known principles, but in the fact that it has not accom- 
plished even more. Thev admit its herculean labors. 
They exult in its beneficent achievements. The}^ gloiy 
in its great names. Because, as they conceive, how- 
ever, it has not done all the good things that the world 
needed to have performed, tlf^y have cast it aside im- 
])atiently as a wornout instrument fit only to be re- 
membered for the labors it has achieved. These are 
rugged, self-willed, independent men, who rarely yield 
their own conviction to persuasion or advice and are 
susceptible only to the stern tuition of unexpected 
events. These men think that the republican party 
needs only to be scourged and lashed by defeat to en- 
able it to perform, in the future as in the past, a daily 
complement of beneficent miracles They forget that 
the era during which it has borne sway has been as 
exceptional as the party which has held the reins of 
power. 

There has been within the party, too, almost from 
its organization a peculiar conflict between those term- 
ing themselves "practical politicians" and those Avho 
were desig-nated with somethino^ of derision as " senti- 
mental statesmen." The one believed in the omnipo- 
tence of "management" and the other in the ultimate 
triumph of right. The one pinned its faith on cam- 
paign methods, the other on underlying principles. 
The "sentimentalists" believed that right would tri- 
umph because of its inherent power. The " practical 
politicians" based their hope of success largely on their 
own ability to outwit the devil, or rather to enlist him 
on the side of righteousness, at least a portion of the 



132 A MAN OF DESTINY. 

time. This conflict has had some curious phases. The 
"practical politicians," who were at first ambitious 
workers of the other parties who espoused the cause of 
the new organization, took upon themselves all the 
credit of success. The Se wards. Weeds and Chases — 
battered veterans of party machinations — looked with 
something of contempt upon such simple souls as the 
Lincolns, Sumners, Garrisons and PhilHpsesof the new 
party. I use these names as types. Great and small 
there were many of each of them. The " practical " 
men regarded the sentimental abolitionists as in fact 
only a little less pestiferous than their democratic 
opponents. They counted them Avell-intentioned, but 
purblind idealists — unreasoning infants who whimpered 
for tlie moon. While they were compelled to rely upon 
their support, they yet dreaded their enthusiasm. The 
" sentimentalists " believed in open warfare. The " prac- 
tical " men relied entirely upon flank movements. To 
the one class, politics was the conflict of ideas ; to the 
other, a game of skill. To the one class, "one, with 
God," was counted "a majority," sure to win in the 
end. To the other, the end justified the means; and 
victory, however achieved, constituted success. The 
"practical" politicians were the great objectors of the 
party. They were forever applying the pneumatic 
brakes of vociferous protestation against the indiscre- 
tion and outspoken zeal of their associates. They were 
on the Lord's side, but could see no good reason for 
exasperating the devil by allowing him to find it out. 
They spoke civilly enough of John Brown in Kansas, 
but as soon as he struck Virginia he became only " old 



A MAN OF DESTINY. 133 

man Brown," and lest his insane movement should 
destroy the party they made haste, not only to deny the 
imputation of responsibility, but also all sympathy with 
the man or the movement. They were never able to 
understand why, instead of killing the party in some 
mysterious way, it made it stronger than ever. To the 
''sentimentalists" this and the events that followed 
served as an irrefutable confirmation of their belief in 
the mystic potency of right. Both elements claim for 
themselves the chief credit for all the party's achieve- 
ments. The sentimentalists believed that only the 
enthusiasm, confidence and heroic constancy of the 
abolition cohorts carried the republican banner to 
victory. The "practical" statesmen declare that only 
their shrewdness, caution and stout disapproval of the 
extravagant notions of their allies saved it from defeat. 

These two sections of the party have not been wont 
to treat eacli other gingerly. Each has manifested its 
distrust and not unfrequently its contempt for tlie 
other. The " practical politicans " have been wont to 
sneer at their co-worliers as " literary fellers " and to 
refer to their motives as " barren idealities." 

To them slavery and its resultants were complicating 
accidents, and they did not feel exactly at home while 
human right was in the lead and policy subordinated 
to justice. To them statesmanship liad always a milled 
edge, and the unit of its extent was the exact diam- 
eter of a dollar. To them the ways and means were 
of prime importance. Their strategy had no ultimate 
objective. Their policy did not point to a specific end, 
but Avas intended to lead as far as ])ossible in a certain 



134 A MAN OF DESTINY. 

direction, and then if the road became too difficult to 
take another, but at all events to keep ahead of their 
opponents. Their aim was success, and their touch- 
stone of achievement a majority. 

The " sentimentaUsts " despised and denounced 
their yoke-fellows. They thought that all a part}^ 
required was principles of the riglit sort, faith and for- 
titude. To them success was only an incident. If it 
did not come in their day it would in some other. 
They were willing to labor and to wait. Suffering and 
self-sacrifice they considered among the essentials of 
achievements. As long as the party was going in that 
direction they sweated cheerfully at the tug-ropes. 
They scorned compromises and abominated '' deals." 
They counted the "■ practical statesman" only a clog 
and a hindrance. They accepted the results, but pro- 
tested against his methods. They counted it better 
that the party should suffer defeat than allow its prin- 
ciples to be relaxed even for an instant. They claimed 
all the party's achievements as their work and believed 
that it would have accomplished far more had not the 
" practical statesmen " impaired its strength. Of course 
these notions were held with varying degrees of inten- 
sity. The "sentimentalist" sloped off by an infinite 
gradation to the level of the "practical statesman." 
Kow and then a man of rare harmony of character 
seemed to combine the best elements of both. The ex- 
tremes always existed, however, and as long as the 
great common purpose remained — as long as the road 
to the goal of the sentimentalist was the one the 
" ])ractical statesman " pursued for the achievement of 



A MAN OF DESTINY. 135 

power, they were only safe and healthful checks upon 
each other. When, however, the nnpression got abroad 
that the republican party had done the work for which 
it was especially organized, that there were no further 
questions affecting human right and liberty to be deter- 
mined, but only matters of administration and detail— 
of taxation and expenditure to be decided — many of 
the idealists withdrew and the '' practical statesmen " 
confidentl}^ undertook the task of switching the party 
upon a new track. 

Of course, in any party of progress, there must 
always be such opposing elements, but because of the 
facts of its history they were probably never before so 
clearly defined. Before they joined hands neither 
could succeed. While they co-operated heartily they 
were invincible Whether they will again unite in the 
near future depends entirely on the question whether 
an issue shall arise sufficiently momentous and engross- 
ing to absorb and unify these elements. At present 
no question stands in the foreground which is at all 
capableof accomplishing such result. Some think that 
the regulation of the civil service has taken the place 
of the old question of individual right, and is to be the 
absorbing impulse of a grand to-morrow. Thus far it 
has shown none of the elements of a popular issue. 
Unlike all great questions of the past, it has started 
from the top and seeks to make its way downward to 
the masses by percolation. The question of trade and 
finance have more than once shown themselves too 
weak to disrupt the phalanx that will soon control the 
government. The nation seems content to leave the 



136 A MAN OF DESTINY. 

peculiar questions arising out of the social and political 
condition of affairs at the south either to settle them- 
selves or to develop a more pressing necessity for na- 
tional intervention. So far as present appearances 
indicate, therefore, the republican party has before it 
one of two prospects, to wit : Either a sudden and 
seemingly fortuitous accession to power through the 
development of some unexpected question of over- 
weening im]3ortance, or a long and difficult struggle as 
the party of opposition fighting over questions of ad- 
ministration and detail only, until the accumulated 
force of dissent from the course of the predominant 
party shall give it a reliable majority in all the states 
of the north. Which of these fates await it, depends 
almost entirely on your administration. 

I said in my last that you were the period which 
marked the conclusion of the history of the republican 
party. This assertion was based upon the fact that 
only a stupidity as stupendous as your luck could give 
opportunity for reuniting the inharmonious elements 
of the republican party, and enable it to overthrow a 
thoroughly disciplined and compacted party, having 
more than three-fourths of its electoral inajority all 
ready to be counted without the formality of a vote. 
If your administration is not such as to paralyze the 
efficiency of this splendid political machine, then 1 was 
right in saying that your place in history will be that 
of the dot which marks the close of a glorious chapter. 
Unless, however, you shall display more of wisdom and 
sagacity than you have thus far manifested as presi- 
dent-elect, even this honor will be more than you will 



A MAN OF DESTINY. 137 

achieve, and instead of pointing the close of an era — 
instead of making a fall stop in the record of human 
progress you will constitute only a dash, which, while 
apparently separating, serves in fact but to connect two 
epochs of republican glory. So great is your oppor- 
tunity and so plaiii the pathway of success, that you 
would be entitled to even less credit than you would 
receive for keeping warm the presidential chair four 
years in order that an ambler and worthier representative 
of the party might occupy and enjoy it afterward. 
Should you fail to do even this, however, you will find 
your ignominy to be in exact proportion to your op- 
portunity, and that those who now wait for 3^our 
coming with hope will note your departure Avith jeers. 
To-day you ai'e greeted as a man of destiny. To- 
morrow you may be forever famous as the fool of luck. 
For you there is no middle course. You must either 
do a man's work or win a palterer's fame. Judging 
your future course by your past achievement the heart 
grows sick at the prospect of impending shame. If 
you were one of those, your masters, who looked into 
our faces over the wall at Gettysburg and flinched not 
at the sheet of flame that marked its crest, however 
much of evil might result from his vigorous rule, we 
might still honor the manhood he would exemplify. 
For you there is no such charitable refuge. As ii man 
even the most unworthy soldier of the confederacy 
must blush with shame when he sees you representing 
the power of the nation. If you fail to achieve suc- 
cess you have no citadel of self-respect within which 
you can retire and demand the regard even of the 



138 A MAN OF DESTINY. 

meanest of your countrymen. You must win and de- 
serve an enviable fame or reap an eternal harvest of 
ridicule too liglit and flavorless to merit even the dig- 
nity of contempt. Your friends stand ready to curse, 
your enemies to laugh. All the world waits to see if 
fame is to be the meed of luck, or destiny is to grind 
its smirking victim to powder. 

Respectfully, 
New York, February 11, 1885. SiVA. 



ISTo. XI. 

WHO IS SIYA? 

To Geoyer Cleveland, President-Elect : 

31y Dear Sir, — The efforts of your angry henchmen 
either to discover my identity or deter me from further 
dehneation of your character by wholesale denuncia- 
tion of my own are as foolish as they are vain. If they 
should succeed in their quest, it would only increase 
their chagrin. You, measuring my motive by your 
own inclination, no doubt, are reported to have said, in 
allusion to one of my letters : " The writer is probably 
some government Diogenes, who is afraid I will deprive 
him of his tub as well as stand in his sunshine." The 
wit of this remark has such an elephantine grace, and 
the impulse assigned is one so thoroughly harmonious 
with your character, that I have no doubt the crony 
who bore the tale spoke the truth. Unfortunately for 
your meditated revenge, I am not only beyond the 
reach of power, but, looking "o'er the verge of life's 
abyss," I note with untroubled vision the panorama of 
events. I do not know that " the sunset of life gives 
me mystical lore." The years that stand between us 
are not so many as to warrant the conclusion that your 
life is before you and mine behind me. Such, indeed, 
may not be the case ; but you, who know me, w^ould, 
if my name were whispered in your ear, realize the 

139 



140 A MAN OF DESTINY. 

futility of any attempt to deter me by any threat 
relating to the future, of which I ask nothing. 

As the future can hold nothing for me that should 
awaken fear ; so the past contains little that I regret. 
Save to do a man's part in an honorable station I had 
never much ambition. The little that I felt has long 
since been abundantly gratified. I do not address you 
from the level of the partisan, though it is a plane 
which the worthiest American need not be ashamed to 
occupy If you had exhibited enough public spirit to 
have become an earnest partisan, the countr}^ would 
not to-day be shamed by the spectacle of one who 
within a month will wear her highest honors forced 
to confess himself ignorant even of the names of the 
leaders of his own party, and so scantily equipped with 
knowledge of our j^olitical historv, that he has to learn 
from the Kps of others even the most notable events in 
the lives of contemporaries so prominent in the public 
mind as to be accounted fit and proper persons to hold 
portfolios in the cabinet of a democratic president. In- 
deed, sir, if you had risen to the level even of a demo- 
cratic partisan these letters would never have been 
written. It was because you had never shown enough 
interest in your country's welfare to master the most 
salient facts of her current history^ that I felt it not 
only my privilege but my duty to portray your mental 
and moral lineaments as they truly- are, as well for 
your own sake, as for the good of our countrymen 
whose strange fatuity has foisted you into a position 
where ignorance serves no more to palliate error than 
it does at the common law to excuse crime. 



A MAN OF DESTINY. 141 

Much clamor has been made because I have presumed 
to address you in this manner without disclosing my 
identity. I deemed this quite unnecessary because I 
knew that not only your own consciousness but the in- 
most knowledge of those coming nearest to your life 
would confirm every stroke of my limning. As a por- 
trait it is of the severely realistic school, showing the 
subject as he is, not as he ought to be — as he is capable 
of being, not as good men might wish he were. Into 
this picture imagination has not entered in the least 
degree. Its life-like verity results from the fact that 
it was painted, not from any substituted model, but 
from continuous and oft-times unintended stud}^ of the 
living subject, until every line and shade of his char- 
acter were ineradicably stamped upon my consciousness. 

As an elector I am of riglit entitled to address you as 
a servant about to enter my employment. It is true 
you were not my choice, and with my knowledge of 
your character I do not believe any one would have 
chosen you. You were engaged, however, by one act- 
ing nominally at least in my behalf, to serve for a cer- 
tain specified term. Though I can hardly admit the 
right of this agent to act for myself and others, believ- 
ing his credentials to be tainted with fraud, yet, as it is 
not proposed to raise this question, and as the objection 
to your character is not of a kind to invalidate the con- 
tract, you may be considered legally engaged to serve 
your masters — the people — during a specified period. 
This being the relation which exists between us, I feel 
.entirely free, as one of the principals, whose collective 
will and purpose you are expected to execute, in ad- 



142 A MAN OF DESTINY, 

dressing you without form or ceremony as my pros- 
pective servant, in regard to duties you are about to 
assume; your ability to discharge them properly; the 
influence that will surround you in your new position, 
and the results that may accrue both to yourself and 
the world from the good or ill performance of the same. 
It may be that I have also been unconsciously influ- 
enced by another feeling. "While I do not at all 
subscribe to the maxim that " familiarity breeds con- 
tempt," there are certainly cases in which the more 
comj^lete our knowledge of another the less exalted is 
our opinion of him. Though I cannot claim to have 
been in any esoteric sense your friend, yet we have 
been nearer neighbors than you perhaps suppose. In 
a sense we may be said to iiave been boys together, for 
though the cares of life had settled on my shoulders 
ere you had yet attained to man's estate, the same chill 
breezes fanned our brows in early manhood, and, hke 
you, I have still the habit of clutching at my beaver's 
brim when I approach the crossing of a street. It is 
said that every one who lives a twelve-month in the 
city where your luck sprouted like Jack's bean-stalk 
while you slept gets this habit fastened upon him for 
life. I do not know how this may be, but I catch 
myself doing it every now and then, and one would 
as soon expect a Texas steer to pass an electric light 
without shying as to see you wear the treasured 
memento of a thoughtful friend's recognition of your 
power to serve his wishes around a corner in the 
balmiest weather without grasping it with at least one 
stalwart hand firmly by the brim. 



A MAN OF DESTINY. 143 

I do not know that I ever met you personally in 
those ante-belhim days. Your countenance may per- 
haps have been familiar to my vision. I may even 
have had a dim consciousness of what you were, if not 
a specific knowledge of your name and station. Per- 
haps you did not affect that plane of society in which 
my acquaintance chiefly lay, and I should be most 
unwilling to admit tliat I had any familiarity witli 
that stratum of the city's life on which you especially 
conferred the favor of your familiarity. It is true 
also that the influences surrounding our lives gradually 
became more and more dissimilar as time wore on. 
Though we botli drifted into the same profession, it 
did not happen to me to remain and gatlier in the 
crumbs of practice falling from the tables of the absent 
elders in those early days. As you already know, I 
was one of those weak souls whom the whirlwind of 
Avar swept off their base and whisked away where the 
hot gusts of battle played with lives and fortunes. 

It was only after the struggle was over, when suf- 
fering had put its crown of thorns upon my life and set 
its coronal of gray upon my brow, that I came to know 
you personally. The exigencies of war had sapped the 
abundant vitality of manhood's prime, and left me 
Aveak and broken upon the strand that bounds life's 
best activities. I thought then that my life Avork was 
ended. I had done a simple soldier's part, and reaped 
a soldier's reAvard — the consciousness of duty per- 
formed. The past held nothing of Avhich I Avished to 
boast; the future nothing for Avliich I dared to hope. 
The fetid odor of the prison pen was in my nostrils. 



144 A MAN OF DESTINY. 

There was left to me only a shred of hope spared from 
a life whose opportunities had been wrecked by the 
wild and foolish impulse to share in the salvation of the 
nation and the upbuilding of an age. Yet, somehow, 
I could not feel despondent. I was not yet old — in 
years at least — and life, though shattered, was still 
sweet. By rare good fortune it has since been pros- 
perous and peaceful, and the love for those " who love 
for others show " has kept warm ^vithin my breast. I 
know it Avas a silly thing to offer one's life for a mere 
notion, but I am glad I was moved to do it, and I can- 
not help honoring above all others those who answered, 
however weakly, to the country's call for men. They 
may have done nothing — there may have been no need 
for them to do — but the simple fact that they were 
willing to give themselves a sacrifice for others seems 
to me to entitle tliem to peculiar consideration, espe- 
cially from those who were benefited by their action. 
This may be all a mistake. Perhaps, on my part, it is 
the result of comradeship. Matures that are welded by 
the hot-blast of peril are not easily sundered. Yet I 
do not believe that the mere fact of an accidental 
association is the reason why I so highly esteem the 
proffer of life for the nation's preservation. I admit 
that your favorite theory, that a soldier is at the best 
only a brute, is in a sense true. There is a good deal 
of brutality about man under any conditions. There 
are various sorts of brutality and I must confess that, 
to my mind, the brutality that impels men to stand 

*' Between our loved homes and the war's desolation " 
is a good deal better than the brutality which sits quiet 



A MAN OF DESTINY. 145 

amid the tumult of arms, unmoved by national peril 
and individual woe, and simply says to himself and 
cronies, Avho are like-minded with him, "Eat, drink and 
be merry." I am not sure that I do not prize the 
"bruiser" who trains his muscles simply that he may 
excel in brutal combat more highly than the mei-e 
debauchee ayIio regards his body only as an instrument 
that ministers to his sensuous gratification. Both are 
brutes, no doubt ; but the one is typified by the lion, 
the other by the hog. The hog is harmless, I admit, 
and by some deemed edible, but for me, I much prefer 
the leonine type, whether of man or beast. This 
notion may be a very erroneous one. I am inclined 
now to think that it is — an opinion in which I am 
aware that joii heartily concur. At that time, however, 
this idea had so strong a hold upon my mind that, even 
Avith the grave yawning before me, I think I was more 
nearly at peace witii all men than I had ever been 
before. I am almost ashamed to confess 'that I was 
then so grateful for the privilege of having been 
allowed to do even a little toward accomplishing the 
result which millions of flaunting banners proclaimed, 
that I really pitied one who had missed such glorious 
opportunity. 

It was just at this time that I first became consciously 
aware of your identity. Your story was told me by 
an approving friend who prophesied that, if your appe- 
tites did not get the better of your discretion, you 
would become — very wealthy ! I remember^ smiling at 
the prediction and pitying the subject. It seemed to 
me such a mean and petty thing that one having the 
10 



form of man — the thews and sinews of a strong, young 
man — one unhampered by domestic ties or moral obli- 
gations — should have lived through those climacteric 
years and won, even from a friend, only the dubious 
commendation that he Avould grow rich, if the breech- 
ing of prudence proved strong enough to restrain his 
inclination. Since that hour I have watched with 
curious interest your rise and — I like to have said — 
development. To have used that term, however, would 
have been to do injustice to your hick as well as to my 
instinct for scientific accuracy. What you were then, 
so far as I have been able to discern, you still remain. 
The only difference I discover is, that while in those 
days you assumed to be in the main only what you 
were, your sudden and fortuitous exaltation has awak- 
ened a dim, instinctive sense of shame for your intel- 
lectual and moral nakedness, which has induced you to 
adopt various flimsy devices for its concealment. You 
realize indistinctly that you have very few of those 
attributes and attainments which your position demands. 
Unfortunately, you deplore this fact much less than its 
discovery. You seem to think that the concealment of 
defects is almost equal to tlie possession of virtues. So 
you wrap yourself up in the fooFs mantle, silence, and 
fondly imagine that, by listening to the opinions of 
others, you will pick up enough ct statesmanship to last 
during your term. The idea is about as practicable as 
for a sea captain to expect to learn navigation by glu- 
ing his car to the forecastle hatch. He who would 
utilize the weather-eye and nautical experience of the 
seafarer must himself be a sailor ; and the ruler who 



A MA2s^ OF DESTIJS'Y. 147 

would gather wisdom from the counsel of partisans 
must have beforehand, not onty some knowledge of 
political history, but, above all things, a patriot's ear- 
nest aspiration for the welfare of his country. 

It has been rashly asserted by some of your over- 
zealous followers, that in what I have written of you, 
I have been moved by envy and the promptings of a 
defeated ambition. In this they have been singularly 
unfortunate. My ambition for public place has been 
so much more than gratified that I have long since 
come to regard with something akin to aversion any 
mark of public approbation that carries with it specific 
duty. "While never liking to be deemed a shirk. I have 
sometimes wished that I might obtain exemption from 
civic duty as you did a soldier's danger — by putting in a 
substitute. As for the promptings of envy. I am sure 
that one must have read these letters very carelessly 
who could believe the writer to be moved by any feel- 
ing of personal ill-will. In truth, I am as incapable 
of envying the fate which has thrust you into a posi- 
tion you are so singularly unfitted to adorn as I was 
of beOTudo^ino: vou the luck that brouo-ht vou throuo^h 
the era of conflict with an unpanctured hide and with- 
out one flutter of anxiety save when your name was 
drawn from the wheel and you were ordered to re]^ort 
in person or by proxy for a soldier's duty. We are so 
widely separated in temper and inclination, so antipo- 
dal in the direction that life has given to our respective 
thoughts, that it is impossible for me to regard you 
with any other feeling than that which an interested 
scientific observer has for a rare and curious specimen 



148 A MAN OF DESTINY. 

in his own peculiar line of study. To me yon are 
simply a curious anomaly — a man without positively 
attractive or seriously offensive features of character. 
You resemble both in personal attributes and in the 
impression made upon the observer the larger species 
of the Laridge, one of whose favorite haunts is the 
blue waters of the lake which beats tumultuously 
against the wharfage of your adopted city. Xo one 
can feel animosity or hardly repulsion toward one of 
those graceful creatures Avho toss so easily and securely 
about in the wake of the storm — pure white wraiths 
which show against the darkness, 

" Like spirits that lie in the azure sky 
When they love but live no more." 

We know him to be the scavenger of the sea. When we 
see him lightly perched upon the crest of the wave we 
know that, though seemingh^ as pure and sweet as the 
messenger sent forth from the drifting ark, or the herald 
of peace that hovered above the Master's brow, he is in 
fact engorging himself upon the putrid offal which the 
perturbed sea casts up. He skirts the storm, not be- 
cause he loves the conflict of wind and wave, exults in 
the strength of his wing, or glories in outdoing other 
denizens of the misty air, but because the vexed sea 
gives up the dead on which, he feasts. His eye is as 
keen as the eagle's. His flight is swifter than the fal- 
con's. His plumage as spotless as the dove's. But his 
eye never flashes defiance to an enemy. Its red glare 
tells only of the vulture's ignoble greed. His sweeping 
pinion never l)ears him to the fray but serves him only 
in flight or to bear him swiftly to his putrid prey. The 



A MAN OF DESTINY. 149 

cry that comes out of the darkness of the storm is not 
the shrill note of defiance, but the harsh squawk of fear 
or hunger. His seemingly spotless plumage on near 
approach turns out perhaps to be a dirty gray, and 
what seems the sweet etheral sprite, when brought 
within the closer range of sense, is found reeking with 
fetid odor of the sea's decaying life. We know these 
things, yet no one hates the gull. Children watch his 
gambols with delight. Nature seems to have exempted 
him from hostility. 'No other bird preys upon him, 
and it would be vain for any to pursue. By the distant 
beholder he is regarded with complacency, if not with 
admiration. The instinct of the scavenger preserves 
him from too near approach. The naturalist may de- 
light in the study of the mew, but he is not sought 
after for the aviary. To accuse me of animosity toward 
you is to do injustice not only to your excellencies, but 
even to your defects ; for while the former may stim- 
ulate a mild approval, the latter can never do more 
than awaken a languid dislike. What you have to fear 
is not hatred, but something more fatal to a man of 
destiny — contempt. Hatred is impotent to hinder im- 
mortality, but a sneer blights fame's fairest flower. 

I will go farther, sir, and say that my interest in 
you is of a very friendly character. You represent a 
most interesting experiment which I have watched 
with no little anxiety. You typify to-day the negative 
element of political evil in contradistinction to its more 
acrid and malevolent forces. As a choice of evils the patri- 
otic citizen ought to pray that you may live long and 
grow day by day, less and less inclined to active and 



150 A MAN OF DESTINY. 

positive measures, in order that the vis inertia of your 
nature may serve to restrain the active and mahgnant 
elements of your party and thereby subserve the inter- 
ests of good government. This way lieth fame for you 
and safety for the republic. I am not the man to deny 
your opportunity or depreciate your capacity to achieve 
an exalted destiny. One of the keenest observers 
whom the world has ever known wrote of a certain 
monarch, some of the shades of whose character were 
singularly like your own : 

" He understood the interests of France and faithfully 
pursued them so long as he could identify them with 
his own." It has been my purpose to convince you 
that your own fame and the country's good lie in the 
same direction. I am not so weak as to hope that you 
will understand the interests of the country or that 
you would care to pursue them if they ran contrary to 
your own. I am not without hope, however, that be- 
fore it is too late you may learn that duty, honor, and 
inclination all point in the same direction— the path- 
way which your previous preparation has especially 
fitted you to pursue. If you can only manage to ac- 
complish as little during the next four years as in the 
forty-seven that are past, you are sure to win the fame 
you are so anxious to enjoy, but are not brave enough 
or strong enough to achieve by any active means. 

It is in these elements of your character and in this 
complexion of the times that I put my trust. This 
may seem but negative approval, but you must remem- 
ber that you are yourself only a supreme negation. It 
is said that you are trying to learn your duties as well 



A MAN OF DESTINY. 151 

as to acquaint yourself with the salient points in the 
history and character of your party associates. You 
will pardon me, I hope, sir, if I say that in my opinion 
it is too late to do either. All that you can do with 
credit to yourself is to do nothing. I would not for 
the world repress in any one the desire to accomplish 
good, but I sincerely believe that in your case such an 
aspiration could onl}^ result in failure and disgrace to 
yourself and peril to the nation, " As you Avere ! " is 
the only military command you are fitted either to give 
or to obey. It is an inflexibly law that " the child is 
father of the man," and that youth shapes the destiny 
of age. Because the leopard cannot change his spots, 
it is as certain as that daylight follows dawning that 
the man who could pass in his early 3^ears through the 
seven tim.es heated furnace of our nation's crucial 
struggle and show no sign of interest in the public weal 
or individual woe the conflict wrought, can ever rise to 
the height of appreciating the nation's need, the age's 
requirement, or his own opportunity. 

Yours, respectfully, 
New York, February 16, 1885. Siva. 



N^o. XII. 

THIIS^E ENEMY'S AEKAY. 

To Groyee Cleveland, President-Elect : 

My Dear Sir, — The republican party when last it stood 
in opposition in the nation was purely a party of con- 
science. Its animating impulse was the immediate limi- 
tation and ultimate extinction of slavery. ' It advocated 
all measures looking to this end on the ground of the 
highest moral right. The economic view of the question 
was urged only as a reason why the slave-holder himself 
should be willing to favor its gradual removal. But 
so far as the action of the party was concerned its sole 
aim was the achievement of a specific object because it 
was in accordance with the highest principles of right. 
Polic}^, expediency, it openly and professedly discarded. 
Probably never before was so little regard paid by a 
party to what are ordinarily termed political consid- 
erations. From the highest to the lowest position 
within the gift of that party devotion to individual 
liberty was the touchstone of a23proval. The man Avho 
was strongest, most earnest, most self-denying, most 
sagacious in the advocacy of the right of the slave to 
freedom, that man was sure to receive the indorsement 
of his party. It was that sentiment which pushed to 
the front that wonderful phalanx of orators and states- 
men who composed the advance guard of the republican 

152 



A MAN OF DESTINY. 15E 

party. The one great essential was the admission and 
advocacy of the right of every man to hberty because 
of the fact of manhood. And because of the unif vins 
power of this great principle, difference upon all other 
questions was forgotten. This thought fused the whole 
party into one homogeneous mass. Touch it where 
you would and the Hash that came from it was the 
electric spark of liberty. 

Unlike any other party that has existed in our 
country since the period of the revolution at least, it 
had but one war cry with which it answered all objec 
tion and overbore all opposition — liberty, equality, 
right. It measured every question that arose by the 
standard of abstract right. Kot only was justice the 
first element which it required in all public measures, 
but the last. Policy, as contradistinguished from 
right, it trampled indignantly beneath its feet. Policy 
and right, justice and expediency, it counted ahvi\ys 
harmonious and inseparable, one and the si.me. It not 
only scorned the political methods of the past but 
mocked at all the accepted theories of political wisdom. 
It counted a grain of truth and justice as outweighing 
all possible considerations of power and advantage. 
For the first time in the history of the world a party 
was organized, grew in strength, and at length achieved 
domination, asking nothing for itself, accepting no 
leadership, caring nothing for the elevation of its 
favorites, but demanding only that justice be done to 
an oppressed and down-trodden people to whom they 
were bound by no ties of ^ ace nor by any distinctive 
community of religious thoaght. 



154 A MAN OF DESTINY. 

As a party of opposition at that time the republican 
party had never known an equal. It was fierce and 
furious beyond any parallel in our history. Every- 
where it was unresting and uncompromising. It over- 
bore opposition by the sheer force of its onset. No 
odds dismayed, no difficulties discouraged it. Its fiery 
zeal burned up the dross of all baser considerations. It 
pursued its opponents with unwearying ardor and with 
unshrinking ruthlessness. It pulled down the high and 
lifted up the low. It smote its enemies hip and tliigh 
with rutliless disregard of all other considerations. It 
scourged the slaveholder with the lash of his own bar- 
baritv. It repaid insult with infamy. It rewarded 
treachery with unfathomable shame. When the pulpit 
thundered against it, it divided the church. When the 
south threatened dissolution, it answered with defiance. 
It flouted every political dogma that was not based on 
the one corner-stone of universal liberty. It crushed 
with an utter indifference to past services every man 
who did not account the divine doctrine of equality of 
rigiit as outranking and overshadowing all other polit- 
ical questions. 

Above all tilings, it may be said of the republican 
party in that day that it was a good hater. There was 
no middle ground between it and its enemies. It had 
no hangers-on, no malcontents, no half-hearted fol- 
lowers. He that was not with it stood against it. It 
hurled the fire of its denunciation just as fiercely against 
the doubter and malio-ner as ao;ainst its more active 
enemies. Nay, it went farther and regarded with a 
peculiar scorn those opponents of the slave's liberty 



A MAN OF DESTINY. 155 

who chanced to dwell in what were termed the ^' free 
states" of the Union. For the slave-holder himself, 
however bitterly it might deplore the crime and the sin 
of his acts, however fiercely it might denounce his arro- 
gance, and however stoutly it might resist his aggres- 
sions, it professed the most abounding charity. It ad- 
mitted the bias of long-established custom; it recog- 
nized the palliating tenor of national law, the influence 
of public opinion, the example of former ages, and 
above all things the natural force of self-interest and 
the inherited inclination of the Anglo-Saxon to main- 
tain whatever he has come to regard as guaranteed to 
him by prescribed right. Because of this, the repub- 
lican part}^, fused by the intensity of its abolition core, 
" in the very heat and fury of its wrath," acquired the 
habit of distinguishing between the principles., it op- 
posed and the personality of its opponents. It hated 
slavery, but it pitied and forgave the slave-holder. It 
hated oppression, but excused the oppressor. It de- 
nounced cruelty and injustice, but admitted the weak- 
ness of human nature and willingly sought excuse for 
the woes that sprang from ignorance, greed, and lust. 
Toward its opponents in the northern states, how- 
ever, it was less charitable. It scourged with a whip 
of scorpions every man of northern birth and training 
who offered excuse for slavery or stood forth as the 
advocate of its continuance or extension. Many a scar- 
ified soul among the democrats of to-day feels still 
the sting of castigation received from the hands of 
knightly champions of liberty. He who will inherit 
your official garment, should you be fortunate enougli 



156 A MAN OF DESTINY. 

to depart this life while yet its flimsy veil conceals your 
essential insignificance — the Hoosier vice-president, 
who looks upon your exaltation as a personal affront to 
himself — is covered from head to heel with welts laid 
on by the lusty hands of abolition giants whose motto 
was to strike and spare not. 

It must be confessed that there was no little of arro- 
gance in the assumption upon which the republican 
party was based. Thoroughly convinced of the right- 
eousness of its underlying idea, it was as intolerant of 
any other belief as slavery itself. There was this dif- 
ference, however, between the intolerance of the re- 
publicans and the arrogance of slavery. The one 
distinguished between the thought and the person en- 
tertaining it. It refused to believe in the sincerity or 
patriotism of any man who was the apologist of 
slavery, but it allowed every one to advocate whatever 
idea he chose without personal molestation. The party 
— or the idea which animated and controlled it — had 
grown up amid the heat of persecution. Wild mobs 
had rocked its cradle. Jeers and curses had been its 
lullaby. N^oisome missiles the diet of its early years. 
Violence and murder the arguments it had overcome. 
The blood of its martyrs had been the seed of its 
strength. The "poor dumb wounds" of its leaders 
were even more eloquent than their words. It had 
learned in this terrible school intolerance of idea, it is 
true, but the most perfect and unquestioning toleration 
of privilege. It spat with frothing scorn upon all the- 
ories and ideas inconsistent with its own all-absorbing 
dogma of equality of human right. It lashed with 



A MAN OF DESTINY. 157 

words of unexampled bitterness those who doubted the 
all-sufficiency of its simple creed. But it remembered 
the days of its own tribulation, and offered neither 
violence nor ostracism to its enemies in the days of its 
success. It arrogated to itself an exclusive monopoly 
of purity of motive and soundness of logic. It allowed 
men to doubt or disbelieve, but it put upon them the 
brand of insincerity or treason to the holiest instincts 
of humanity if they did. 

From the very first hour of its existence the repub- 
lican party was an aggressive power. It moved upon its 
enemy's works along the whole line. Again and again 
it was repulsed, but never for an instant intermitting 
the ardor of its attack. It filled the country with the 
fiery glare of angry disputation. The great leader of its 
armies in the conflict tliat ensued ma}^ well have learned 
the simple strategy by which he succeeded, that of con- 
stant hammering, impetuous attack, and unconditional 
surrender, from the party whose vital spirit gave success 
to the national arms. 

AYith its accession to power under the leadership 
of that noblest of patriots and sweetest of martyrs, 
Abraham Lincoln, the republican party, while losing 
none of its intensity of conviction, came almost in- 
sensibly to acquire something of the tenderness and 
humility of its great head. He who started out to 
perform the stupendous work tliat lay before him with 
simple thankfulness to the people to whose favor he 
owed so much; who asked with bowed head that all 
would pray that he might "receive that Divine assist- 
ance without which I cannot succeed, but with whicb 



158 A MAN OF DESTINY. 

success is certain" ; who declared before entering upon 
his task that if the country could not be saved upon the 
principle of liberty for all that he would " rather be 
assassinated on the spot than surrender it " ; who said 
in the very hour when he took upon himself the obliga- 
tion of the position you are about to assume, to those 
who were already banded in arms against the nation, 
" We are not enemies, but friends " ; he whose last 
immortal declaration " with malice toward none, with 
charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives 
us to see the right," formed a halo enwrapped in which 
he went forth into immortality — this man more than 
all other men, more than all the great events that have 
occurred during its wonderful career, gave tone and 
character to the republican party, prescribed its con- 
trolling sentiment and stamped upon the hearts of its 
rank and file the spirit and temper which has animated 
their conduct. 

As a result of this inspiration they have been always 
generous to their opponents and savageh^ intolerant to 
each other. They have sought excuse for dishonor and 
failed to visit iniquity with punishment. They have 
been marvelously merciful to their enemies, and timor- 
ously unjust to their friends. They have sought 
eagerly for excuse for organized violence, and have 
failed to avenge the slaughter of the innocent. They 
have so worshiped mercy that they have forgotten 
justice. They have so magnified the glory of forgive- 
ness that they have forgotten the condition of penitence 
on Avhich it rightfully rests. They have so feared the 
suspicion of harshness toward a fallen foe that they 



A MAN OF DESTINY. 15b 

have forgotten duty to a helpless friend. They have 
been so keenly alive to the taunts of their opponents 
that they dared not stand by the rights of that 
race whose liberties they were willing to embroil 
a continent in strife to achieve. While condemning 
the abstract principles of those to whom they v*^ere 
opposed, they have tenderl}^ spared the personality of 
their opponents. While contemning the principles of 
their enemies, they have awarded unstinted and unde- 
served praise to their leaders. While boasting of the 
achievements of our armies, they have obliterated from 
our banners the mementoes of victory. While exulting 
in the achievement of liberty for the slave, they have 
turned a deaf ear to the freedman's cry for knowledge 
and for right. They have sought to rule by offering 
to their enemies milk and honey, and putting gall and 
wormwood to the lips of their friends. They have 
demanded of those who serve them more than human 
perfection. In those who opposed they have stood 
ready to excuse the most inhuman barbarism. Smitten 
upon one cheek, they have not only turned the other 
but cringed before the insulter and begged the honor 
of another flout. 

1 have been reminded many times, when contem- 
plating the past of the republican party, of the story 
of Yessantara in his exile upon the rock of Yankagiri. 
When the wicked old Brahman who wanted slaves for 
his young wife, came to the hermitage and demanded 
his two children, the father merely tried to persuade 
him to forego his demand. But when the children ran 
and hid themselves under the lotus leaf, and the Brali 



160 A MAN OF DESTINY. 

man accused the father of having sent them into hiding 
to prevent his obtaining possession of them, Yessantara 
bewailed his misfortune in having such an accusation 
made against him. It seems strange that the inchoate, 
unperfected Buddha should have sought exaltation 
through such a degrading sacrifice. But we knew the 
sacrifice had this excuse : he did it because he hoped 
thereby to save all mankind from infinite woe. So tlie 
republican party, hoping to woo eternal peace to the 
heart of the nation, allowed the helpless children born 
of the throes of war to be led away into a thralldom 
all the more pitiable and unjust because seemingly sanc- 
tified with mercy and sanctioned with the approval of 
their natural guardian and protector. 

From the ver}^ hour of the downfall of the con- 
federacy the republican party has been a tender apolo- 
gist for the natural outgrowth of the principles which 
it combatted in its early days. It has sought forgive- 
ness from its enemies as if it had been the aggressor. 
It has not only condoned the wrong of the past, but 
has striven valorously to forget there was ever any 
right. It has not only restored to the conquered 
enemy the sword of power, but has invited its embroca- 
tion in the blood of the innocent. It has refused to 
wound, even by implication, the tenderest feelings of 
its former foes, but has shut its e3"es while they have 
slaughtered more of its allies, peaceful citizens of the 
republic, than were slain on anv battlefield of the re 
bellion. But this kindliness, this all-abounding charity, 
has been sanctified by so sweet a hope for peace, so 
profound an aspiration for the common weal, such self- 



A MAN OF DESTINY. 161 

abnegating humility of purpose and sucli all-pervading 
doubt of its own rectitude; such a royal scorn of un- 
Avorthiness in its own ranks and such magnificent trust 
in the patriotism and chivalry of its opponents, that 
even their malignity finds itself almost at loss for 
phrases to express the scorn it feels. Its vices so ''in- 
chne to virtue's side" that even those who suffer from 
its weakness can but admire the sweetness of its 
motive. It died from too much trust in its enemies and 
too little faith in its friends. It died by over-working 
mercy, from an abounding fear lest it should be unjust. 
It died from continual praising of its foes and dispar- 
agement of its friends. It died because 'its humility 
was so great indeed that it feared it might become 
vain-glorious. It died because it thought it had per- 
formed all the good needed to be done, and feared 
lest in its zeal it had gone too far and done perhaps 
too much. 

It is not my place, sir, to take one leaf from the 
chaplet of this glorious j^arty. Bewailing as I do its 
failure to conclude the great work which it set out to 
accomplish ; distrusting as I do every potent element 
of the party which you represent ; despairing as I do 
of any good result from the evil domination that will 
control the land through you, its instrument, far be it 
from me to utter one word in derogation of a time so 
rich in marvelous events, a period so fecund in great 
names, a party so glorious in beneficent and grand 
achievements Its epitaph is written in one word — suc- 
cess. But that word must be translated as a poet has 
lately sung; 
11 



162 A MAN OF DESTINY. 

"Success 
Is sacrifice. So lay me in the tomb, 
And let some perfect bloom 
Grow thence for God to pluck and call success." 

Its very success, however, has unfitted the party for 
the role of the opposition. It has so cultivated self- 
scrutiny; it has grown so tender of the wishes and 
feelings of its enemies, and so regardless of the rights 
and sentiments of its friends; it has so prided itself 
upon applying the touchstone of judgment with impar- 
tiality; it has been so long accustomed to account 
itself responsible for the welfare of the nation rather 
than of its own ascendency ; it has so long deprecated 
its own excellencies and magnified the virtues of its 
opponents that it has for a time lost the power of con- 
centrated assault and steady, unrelenting hostility. It 
has to learn again the tactics of its earlier years. 
It must see evil triumphant and peril impending before 
it can rally its forces again to assured victory. In the 
meantime it must undergo a transformation. 

Instead of being a proponent, it must become an ob- 
jector. Instead of defending, it must assail. The habits 
of thought of a quarter of a century must be over- 
turned, and the struggle of a past generation be again 
commenced under circumstances so different as to 
render early success altogether improbable. 

Such a change of methods or ideas is not easily or 
quickly effected at the best. The republican party of 
to-day has no central idea sufficiently potent to fuse all 
its discordant elements. There is no one principle in 
support of which all its factions are agreed, and to the 



A MAN OF DESTINY. 163 

establishment of which they are wiUing to subordinate 
all other considerations. The one differential element 
of its pristine life is wanting. Though the margin by 
which it was defeated was excessivel}^ small — the thou- 
sandth part of one per cent in your state — yet it cannot 
be doubted that a considerable portion of its vote, 
especially in that state, was cast by men naturally and 
logically belonging to the ranks of its opponents. Suc- 
cess will win the greater portion of these to their 
former allegiance, wdiile exasperation and chagrin will 
prevent a considerable portion of the tAvo recalcitrant 
elements of the republican party from returning to its 
support. In addition to this, a party coming into power 
after having been a generation in the minority offers 
great inducements not merely to active and ambitious 
partisans, but to self-seeking converts, reckless and 
aspiring swashbucklers, to whom the full ranks of a 
party which has been long in power offer little oppor- 
tunity. The republican party in its twentyefive years 
of prosperity has not only gathered into its fold many 
to Avhom personal advantage and the glamour of vic- 
tory are of greater moment than the public weal, but 
it lias also many ambitious and disappointed men who 
will look to the success of the democracy as the oppor- 
tunity of a lifetime for acquiring prominence and pre- 
ferment. " Wheresoever the carcass is, there will the 
eagles be gathered together," and vultures hover ever 
about the rear of a victorious army. 

The opportunity which lies before you and your 
associates in the representative branch of the govern- 
ment for perpetuatmg the ascendency of your party 



164 A MAN OF DESTINY. 

is unmatched in the history of representative govern- 
ment. Unfortunately for jou, the enemies you have 
to fear are those of your own household. You and 
they have been elevated to power only on probation. 
The abounding charity which republicanism inspired 
has only at the best been sufficient to induce a bare 
majority of four northern states to accept democratic 
national ascendency with a sort of mental reservation 
in case of its failure to justify their hope. The one 
thing that would almost instantly restore the repub- 
lican party to its pristine strength and vigor would be 
for the democracy to show its true colors and give to 
the country such an administration as would naturally 
be expected from a party composed of such elements 
as it unquestionably contains, headed by a leader of 
such antecedents as yourself. "Weak as defeat lias left 
the republican party after its long lease of power, and 
favorable as the auspices appaiently are under which 
your party assumes control of the government, the 
task which lies before 3^ou and them is of the most diffi- 
cult and doubtful character. One of two courses are 
necessary to perpetuate your success. Either your 
party must be held in check, the status quo maintained 
with a rigor hitherto undreamed of in our countr}^, and 
nothing done or attempted save to exliume and magnify 
the errors of the past and the shortcomings of your 
adversaries while in power, or your party must be born 
again, ^o trivial change, no coat of gleaming lacquer, 
no outward assum]>tion of a broad humanity and a self - 
forgetful patriotism will suffice. If you are able to sit 
in the seat of power and do nothing, the chances are 



A MAN OF DESTINY. 



vastly in your favor. But if the old democratic lust 
of power prevails over your inertia; if the "solid 
south'^ is to be again "in the saddle"; if the wrong 
which republican weakness permitted grows arrogant 
and aggressive, no power on earth can save them from 
annihilating overthrow and you from well-merited 
infamy. 

Do not think, sir, that these contingencies afflict me 
sorely. I Ivuow that sooner or later the right will 
triumph. The past, which alone affects me personally, 
is secure. The party to which its. glorj^ was chiefly 
due neither died of dry rot nor was it defeated in fair 
and open conflict in the arena of public thought. By 
secret violence and fraud that stifled the voice of a 
million voters and by the weakness and treachery of its 
most favored allies alone was it overcome. I know 
very well that the tree of liberty must be enriched not 
only by blood but also by decay. I realize that shame 
is the chief stimulant of honor. I know full well that 
out of the dregs of slavery, out of the debris of treason, 
out of hatred and fraud and murder, out of selfishness 
and lethargy and greed, out of weakness and cowardice 
and sloth, out of all those elements which are hostile to 
freedom, humanity and the right, no flower of liberty, 
no substantial and enduring prosperity, can by any 
possibility spring. I am sure also that neither you nor 
the party you so fitly represent can by any means pre- 
vent the ultimate completion of the work which the 
republican party has so gloriously begun. If it were 
possible for them to take up the mission which the 
republican party has laid down and carry it to its 



166 A MAN OF DESTINY. 

legitimate results, no words can measure the renown 
which you and your associates would justly achieve. 
But to do that you and they — saving only a fringe of 
unassimilable allies — must give the lie to all your past 
and borrow the spirit which has animated the repub- 
lican party as well as steal the scepter it has wielded. 

Siva. 
New York, February 20, 1885. 



T^o. xin. 

THE STOCK m TEADE. 

To Grover Cleveland, President-Elect : 

My Dear >&>, — It is especially unfortunate for you 
that a lack of interest in public matters led you not 
only to neglect the study of social and political ques- 
tions in your earlier years, but even until the most 
recent period kept you notably and astonishingly igno- 
rant of current and political events. Until you became 
the nominee of your party for the governorship, and 
your ambition was awakened by the unexpected and 
enormous majority which you received at the election 
which ensued, it is safe to say that it would be difficult 
to find a business or professional man, or indeed a 
man of ordinary intelligence in any position in life, 
w^ho was so phenomenally ignorant of the political 
history of this country during the period elapsing since 
you arrived at years of discretion. Even the sequence 
of its most notable events is so dimly impressed upon 
your mind that you fear to converse in regard to them 
lest you should betray the singular inadequacy of your 
equipment for public life. You are one of the very 
few, in that rank of life to which fortune has enabled 
you to aspire, to whom the great intellectual struggle 
that preceded the climax of our national tragedy was 
without significance and without interest. The rela- 

167 



168 A MAN OF DESTINY. 

tions and characters of the great actors in our national 
history have never seemed to you worthy enough of 
study or consideration to merit the intermission even 
for a brief period of your personal pleasures and indi- 
vidual pursuits. As a result of this indifference to 
public events and historical facts, your information 
with regard to our political histor}^ is so fragmentary 
and elliptical as to disarm the ridicule and awaken 
only the pity of him wdio comes to know something of 
its exceptional character despite the guard which a 
phenomenal caution has set upon your tongue. 

This w^ant of knowledge of the past and lack of study 
of the causes wdiich underlie even the present aspect of 
political affairs is not, however, anything like so amaz- 
ing as the climacteric ignorance you have displayed in 
regard to your own political associates. It would seem 
utterly incredible that a man who, for two years at 
least, has counted himself among the "presidential 
possibilities," should have had so little interest in the 
organization, character and personnel of the party to 
wdiich he looked for preferment, as not to know at 
least the names of its leaders in the various states. It 
would even seem to be impossible that one exposed to 
that contagion of current knowledge with which the 
daily press surrounds the life of every intelligent per- 
son, even without the stimulus of personal interest, 
should know so few of the leading men of his day, and 
know^ so little, even of those whom he knew best. That 
a president-elect should be ignorant even of the names 
of individuals of his ow^n party, who have for years 
been its active and efficient leaders in the various 



A MAN OF DESTINY. lf)9 

states, is a fact so astounding that one might well 
doubt the possibility of its occurrence, but for " the 
sensible and true avouch" of many concurrent wit- 
nesses, and the oft repeated admissions of friends who 
have been indiscreet enough to boast of this ignorance 
as a proof of extreme simplicity. That a man should 
be ignorant even of the existence of men who had 
reached the highest level of state preferment before 
his political birth, and ever since have wielded the dic- 
tatorship of his party in their respective states, would 
seem impossible to one having ordinary intelligence 
and living outside the boundaries of that rayless space 
where 

" Darkness might be bottled up 
And sold for Tyrian dye." 

It was bad enough, in all conscience, that the country 
should be required to bear the burden of a president of 
whom his own particular friends could saj^, "In all 
probability his cabinet will be mainly composed of men 
whom he never saw until after his election." But the 
most discouraging feature of your intellectual condi- 
tion is that you do not deem it at all important that 
you should know these things provided only you are 
able to conceal your ignorance of them. Perhaps no 
more astoundingly ludicrous statement is to be found 
in all history than your own naive declaration two 
months after your election that you proposed to de- 
vote the period intervening before your inauguration 
among other things to " posting up on the duties of 
the president ! " It would have been a splendid jest if 
it had not unfortunately been spoken in earnest. The 



170 A MAN OF DESTINY. 

simple truth is that fortune has so favored you, despite 
your ill-equipment, that you despise the power of 
knowledge and inwardly sneer at the idea of its being 
regarded as necessary. It never once occurred to you 
that one could not "post up on the duties of the presi- 
dent" as easily as you were wont to prepare yourself 
to try a charge of vagrancy in a police court. You 
thought you were giving the country an assurance of 
good government when, on the first day of January in 
the current year of grace, you complacently assured 
them that between that time and the fourth of March 
ensuing, you intended to " post up " on the duties that 
may thereafter devolve upon you. You never doubted 
until the laugh went round, and one journal after 
another pointed a jest with jour well-intended declara- 
tion, that any one could doubt that eight weeks were 
sufficient time in which to make a cabinet and to pre- 
pare a president also. 

Strange as it may seem, your ignorance of public 
men and affairs is not in any considerable degree due 
to incapacity. While nature has not blessed you with 
any remarkable intellectual gifts ; while even in those 
matters to which you have chosen to devote your atten- 
tion you have never been able to excel in any notable 
degree your fellows, yet it cannot be denied and should 
not be forgotten that you are blessed with an exceed- 
ing good memory, and have a love for the petty details 
of those matters which bear upon your personal inter- 
ests, which has enabled you to win some reputation for 
sharpness, especially in the management of cases requir- 
ing somewhat more of the shyster's trickery than of the 



A MAN OF DESTINY. 171 

lawyer's acumen. In regard to those things which 
come within the radius of your own personal interest 
and enjoyment, you are by no means dull or listless. 
There are three subjects which you are always ready to 
discuss, and in regard to which you may be said to 
possess an extended if not an accurate knowledge. 
Unfortunately, for the country at least, these favorite 
themes are not in the least degree connected with the 
public welfare. Indeed, they are hardly of a character 
that invites public discussion, ^o doubt, the attention 
you have given to them has tended in a considerable 
degree to diminish in your mind the importance of 
those public , events which only remotely affect your 
individual interest and personal enjoyment. 

Mere obscurity is, of course, no conclusive argument 
against even abnormal capacity. It may imply either 
the lack of opportunity or the indifference of a great 
mind for a pursuit not adapted to its capacity. There is 
no greater fallacy than that which implies a man's capac- 
ity to achieve great things from his ability to perform 
little ones, or the reverse. The man who is fittest to 
rule an empire is not unfrequently incapable of con- 
ducting an ordinary business. Socrates was no doubt 
an ill-provider for his household, else Xantippe had 
hardly visited his head Avith such a manifestation of 
her wrath. Csesar was a bankrupt until the plunder of 
empires filled his treasury. Napoleon was an object 
of rjdicule until his artillery made his name a thing of 
terror. Cromwell was an unsuccessful farmer. Sher- 
man failed both as lawyer and banker. Grant was by 
no means strikingly successful as a tanner. Among 



1Y2 A MAN OF DESTINY. 

your predecessors in oiRce there has been perhaps one 
who had hardly more personal acquaintance among 
his distinguished contemporaries than yourself, but 
every citizen of the republic knew him and his \Yorks. 
More than one of tiiem, however, has proved conclu- 
sively that antecedent obscurity is no guaranty for 
subsequent renown. In all those instances, however, 
where the flower of fame has blossomed on the root of 
obscurit}^, w^e find as abundant evidence the restless 
yearnings of a nature that could not be bounded or 
limited by its own selfish enjoyments and restricted 
surroundings. Before Caesar attained the conmiand of 
a legion he had planned the conquest of the world. 
Cromwell neglected his turnips because his thought was 
intent upon '' the tares that infest the realm of England." 
Kapoleon planned a Corsican empire before he trained 
his guns upon Toulon. Grant's ill-success as a tanner 
was no doubt due to the fact that the mind which held 
in easy and harmonious grasp the movements of a 
dozen armies, whose memory was so marvelous that it 
never lost its hold upon a fact nor required to consult 
authority to inform him of time or place, did not find 
scope for its powers in the limited round of a restricted 
business. In no instance has the fame of great achieve- 
ment been linked w^ith lack of pre])aration, the limit- 
ation of knoNvledge to the narrow bounds of self and 
stolid indifi'erence to the public welfare. The man who 
rises out of obscurity by his own exertion, or seizes, 
with the instinct of genius, the forelock of opportunity, 
only finds tlie merit of subsequent achievement magni- 
fied by contrast with his past. To him wdio is merely 



A MAN OF DESTINY. 173 

seized upon by part}^ necessity, however, and dragged 
neck and crop, limp and inert, over the heads of active, 
capable and meritorious leaders to be dropped a 
flabby mass of surprised selfishness into the seat 
of power no lasting fame has ever come. Oppor- 
tunity enables the well-equipped and waiting man, the 
restless and pantmg soul, to leap to the highest limit of 
fame. It only lifts the non-doer to a dizzy pinnacle in 
order to hurl him doAvn to still greater insignificance. 
It is tlie crow that carries the tortoise to the clouds 
only to drop him upon the rocks. 

It must move the heart even of your most malevolent 
enemy to note with what a beggarly stock in trade you 
will, within a fortnight, open business in the white 
house Around you will stand a group of partisans 
unsurpassed in skill, courage and experience by any 
body of political leaders known to our history, save 
only that magnificent array who fought the battle of 
liberty in the earlier days of the republican party. For 
extent of resource, tested nerve and variety of ex- 
perience it may even be doubted if they were the 
ecpials of the democratic champions of to-day. The 
lessons of peace and war are yet fresh in their memo- 
ries. They have seen libert}^ triumph over oppression, 
and weakness bid defiance to power. They have 
studied the past and the present from vantage ground 
such as h istory has rarely offered. The dead confederacy 
speaks through the lips of its chosen sons the lessons of 
its rise and fall. They who have hung like wolves upon 
the flanks of the republican party for a quarter of a 
century stand ready to warn you of the mistakes of 



174 A MAN OF DESTINY. 

your opponents. These men have fought the battle 
whose trophies you have gathered without exertion, 
and now offer you the resuUs of their experience in 
order that the party may garner through your action 
tlie substantial fruits of victory. They may not be men 
of the broadest principles, or the safest rulers for the 
nation to have, but they are men of rare pohtical 
experience, of the most commanding personahty, who 
have proved their faith by their works. Among them 
you must, of course, stand as a pigmy among giants. 
Well would it be for your future fame if j^ou could 
harmonize their counsels and submit yourself to their 
guidance. Such is the jealousy of your nature, such 
the intensity of your knowledge of 3' our own unworthi- 
ness, however, that you cannot treat another with 
frankness or accord to him the meed of deserved praise. 
Insignificant as you are, they would no douljt gladly sub- 
ordinate themselves and freely dedicate their capacity 
and experience to your service in order to promote the 
success of your administration, if you were but large 
enough to treat them with that candor and sincerity 
which their merit and condescension entitles them to 
receive at your hands. Tliis, however, you cannot do. 
With the instinct of the trickster, with the low cunning 
born of self- bounded ambition, you are already prepar- 
ing to betray the men whom 3^ou are professing to 
honor. Already you are paving the way by which you 
hope and expect to gain advantage from their counsels 
and at the same time repay their devotion with malevo- 
lent injury. You expect, not only to make your coun- 
selors minister to your selfish ambition, but also hope 



A MAN OF DESTINY. 175 

to destroy the future prospects of those who shall help 
to build your fame. Such is the record of your past 
life ; such unquestionably your present purpose. You 
hope to make them responsible for your errors, and to 
take to yourself credit for their wisdom. 

One of the few political ideas which have effected a per- 
manent lodgment in your mind, perhaps from that very 
fact you fondly imagine to be original, is set forth in 
your quaintly phrased and curiously incorrect statement 
that the otRce of president is " essentially executive." 
Outside of jour equivocal utterances with regard to 
civil service and one or two platitudes in regard to 
reform, it is the sole public utterance you have made 
indicating that 3^ou ever gave a moment's thought to 
any national question. This fact, together with the 
quaint irrelevancy of its context and the curiously in- 
definite profession of political faith that preceded it, 
attracted to this trite remark an attention which you 
probably never expected it to receive. Your political 
associates, glad indeed to find such an unexpected 
opportunity, seized upon it at once and paraded it be- 
fore the eyes of the wondering people as evidence of 
your remarkable wisdom and originality. Your op- 
ponents, amazed at the intellectual barrenness, political 
ignorance and constitutional timidity which your long- 
considered letter of acceptance displayed, could only 
laugh at the trite and insignificant phrase which, if it 
meant anything, was as little comprehended by others 
as by yourself. It is hardly strange that the people 
were astonished. Your political associates seemed to 
regard it as a new revelation. Looked upon it as the 



Tib A MAN OF DESTINY, 

one single declaration of an nnknoTrn political prophet 
after forty daj^s' sojourn in the wilderness. It seemed 
no doubt Hke the announcement of a new and radical 
political theory. There was something vague and por- 
tentous in the idea of a man announcing as the great 
all-important conclusion of his meditation that the 
office of president was pureh" executive. 

The prominence thus given to a phrase which you no 
doubt used simply for the lack of something better, has 
led you to regard it as an actual political discovery, 
and your inherent inclination to avoid responsibility 
and shirk exertion has led you to imagine by means of 
it you might escape many of the difficulties of your 
new position. In accordance with this curious idea you 
have formed a settled and ingenious plan by which 3^ou 
expect to cast the odium of unpopular and unsuccessful 
measures, if need be, upon the various members of your 
cabinet, reserving to yourself the opportunity to profit 
by their sagacity. In accordance with this plan, it is 
your purpose to reiterate upon all occasions the purely 
executive character of your office and professedly to 
exalt the power and dignity of the heads of the various 
departments of the government Apparently you are 
to proclaim yourself merely the executive head of a 
council of ministers on whose shoidders alone rest the 
responsibilities for deciding political questions. If any 
accepted line of policy miscarries, you think it will be 
easy to shift the responsibility for failures upon the 
shoulders of one or more of your counselors. If suc- 
cess attends the measures adopted, you fancy it will be 
an equally simple task to arrogate to yourself not only 



A MAN OF DESTINY. 177 

the merit of having chosen Avise ministers, but of having 
inspired, controlled and directed their deliberations. 
The idea is not a bad one for a man of yoar moral and 
intellectual characteristics, in the situation in which 
YOU are placed. But unfortunately for your hopes and 
your fame ministerial responsibiht}^ has no place in 
the constitution; still less is it recognized in that 
governmental system which has grown up outside 
constitutional professions until it has become the real 
national organism. 

It is one of the peculiarities of our anomalous Amer- 
ican system, that he who is apparently at the head of our 
government is, in truth, the very least of those who are 
its actual co-ordinate rulers. In this respect the mold- 
ing influence of time and growth are easily apparent. 

It was no doubt the intention of the fathers to invest 
in the so-called executive head of the nation not only 
the abstract power, but the actual duty of shaping and 
directing the policy of the government in regard both 
to its foreign policy and domestic econom}^ Instead 
of being the mere executive heads of a priv}^ council, 
the cabinet ministers were, as they still are in the eves 
of the law, mere executive agents of his discretion. 
Upon him it was intended that aU responsibihty should 
rest, and he alone was made competent to communicate 
with and advise the legislative branch of the govern- 
ment. This relation has been somewhat relaxed by 
custom, though the cabinet officers are still the mere 
creatures of the president's will and are in no sense 
responsible for the policy or character of the admin- 
istration. 
13 



178 A MAN OF DESTINY. 

While the heads of the various departments have 
grown somewhat in relative importance, the responsi- 
bility resting upon the president has increased rather 
than diminished. In the early days of the republic 
such a thing as a party, in our modern acceptance of 
the term was unknown. When this idea was finally 
developed and became the great distinctive feature of 
our governmental organization, the ofBce of president 
lost the complexion which the framers of the constitu- 
tion sought to confer upon it, and instead of being 
executive, became merely executory in character. A 
change in the presidency became of comparatively 
little moment unless it resulted from a change in party 
ascendency. The direction of national affairs shifted 
from one extreme of political thought to another, not 
with the change of president or cabinet, but only with 
the rise and fall of party power. Owing to this fact 
the president became not merely the executive head of 
the nation, but the recognized official exponent of the 
doctrines and policy of his party. As such he is 
chosen, and the original obligation resting upon him 
to devise and formulate a policy, recognized by a cus- 
tom as old as the government itself, is now transformed 
into a duty to expound and carry into effect the policy 
of his ]3arty. 

It is not to be supposed that 3^ou have yet noted this 
fact. Your mind is not one that readily detects the 
operation of cause and effect, or marks the difference 
between variant classes of phenomena. It required 
considerable more than an ordinary lifetime to enable 
you clearly to grasp or satisfactorily formulate the idea 



A MAl^ OF DESTINY. 179 

that the office was intended to be " purely executive," 
and it would be unjust to such a nature to expect it 
yet to have mastered the fact that, during those very 
3^ears, the formative forces of our republic had insensi- 
bly but surely changed the termination of the descrip- 
tive adjective. Indeed, it is by no means certain that 
you have ever noted an actual difference in signification 
between the two classes of derivatives from the root 
execute. Such, however, unquestionably these are. 
Executive capacity is the power to carry into effect the 
ideas or policy of the individual himself ; but an execu- 
tory position is one in which the incumbent is required 
only to perform the will of another. The same dis- 
tinction extends also to the substantive derivatives, 
executive here retaining its adjectival force, and execu- 
tor and executioner having the contrasted signification. 
Your legal training may perhaps illustrate this fact in 
regard to the former of these terms, and your experi- 
ence in the latter capacity ought certainly to have 
called it to your attention. 

The fact that the office of president, though never 
" essentially executive," nor ever intended so to be. has 
thus been gradually changing its character since the time 
when the father of his country, with his entire cabinet 
in his train, attended the opening of congress and 
scolded the representatives of the people face to face, 
as if he actually occupied a higher plane in the govern- 
mental system, by making its occupant the simple 
recorder and executor of the will of a party expressed 
at the polls, may seem at first sight to be somewhat derog- 
atory to the incumbent. Such, however, is not the case, 



180 A MAN OF DESTmY. 

since the very fact of his selection is supposed to imply 
a special grasp of the principles of his party as well as a 
peculiar capacity for leadership, of which there can be 
no higher test than the direction and control of a great 
party. In your case both of these elements are lack- 
ing, but you must not suppose that this fact will re- 
lieve you from the responsibility which rests upon the 
incumbent of this great office or the nominal head of a 
great party. Do not imagine that any such silly 
speculations as your random declaration in regard to 
the character of the presidential office will be accounted 
statesmanship when no election is impending, or that 
you will be able to shift the odium of failure upon 
others and retain for yourself the credit of success b}^ 
any shallow device regarding ministerial responsibility. 
Unfortunately, both for yourself and the nation, the 
man who is chosen to the office of president is not 
allowed to put in a substitute, except by surrendering 
himself to the direction and control of another and 
stronger nature. Unfortunately your will is on a par 
with 3^our kno^vledg^ of statecraft, and both are more 
notable than your patriotism. So that the country's 
only hope lies not so much in your capacity or incli- 
nation to do good or repress evil as in that magnificent 
inertia which inclines you always to do nothing. If 
you can manage to resist the solicitations of your polit- 
ical creator, refuse to do anything yourself, and pre- 
vent your cabinet from attempting anything more im- 
portant than the exhumation of republican mistakes 
and the prudent use of patronage under a system of well- 



A MAN OF DESTINY. 181 

regulated rewards and punishments, you will probably 
avoid doing the country harm enough to render your 
memory infamous, and secure your party at least an- 
other term of power. Eespectfully, Siva. 
New York, February 20, 1885. 



No. XIY. 

TRISTAM L'HERMITE. 

To Geover Cleveland, President-Elect : 

3fy Dear jSir, — There is something very strange in 
the ahnost universal repulsion which mankind feels for 
one who has with his own hands performed the func- 
tions of the public executioner. It does not, of course, 
arise from any feeling of antipathy for the shedder of 
blood, since the successful soldier is sure to be the pop- 
ular idol. There is something, however, in the thought 
of being the agent by which the sovereign power 
avenges itself upon the guiltiest offenders which sends 
a thrill of horror through the most apathetic of mortals. 
It is hard to say why it should not be accounted a com- 
mendable and praiseworth}^ act. Of course the sen- 
tence of the law must be executed, and that officer who 
performs an unpleasant duty would seem to deserve 
the commendation rather than the execration of his 
fellows. Perhaps it is the terror which the willing in- 
strument of t^^ranny inspired in that ruthless past when 
death was as often the reward of rashness as of crime. 
Inherited prejudices not unfrequently remain long after 
the reason for their existence has ceased. I should be 
inclined to account for such a feeling of aversion upon 
my own part by the story that has come down from 
sire to son for generations, of one who died upon the 
scaffold for devotion to his king. Perhaps he merited 

182 



A MAN OF DESTINY. 183 

his doom not less richl}^ than the Idng, his master. But 
the feeling is too general to be attributed to any such 
exceptional cause. The judge who sentences the culprit, 
the jury who find him guilty, the turnkey who is the 
agent of his confinement until the day of execution, 
none of these share in any considerable degree the 
peculiar nameless infamy that rests upon the individual 
who pulls the trigger or cuts the rope when the blinded 
and manacled victim takes the last terrible leap into 
the darkness of eternity. 

I have seen men killed. Perchance I may even have 
been the cause of death myself. I know I have grasped 
heartily and warmly hands on which the blood of inno- 
cent men slain in mortal combat undoubtedly rested. Yet 
I felt no aversion to their societ}^, and in many instances 
regarded myself honored by their friendship. Yet 
somehow, think of it as I will, reason about it as I 
may, try to my utmost to blot it from my mind as a 
false unreasoning prejudice, I cannot but admit that 
I would rather no friend of mine should ever perform 
this most unpleasant task. In other countries this 
officer of the law is considered an outcast while often- 
times his victims are honored with popular reverence. 

Perhaps no monarch is regarded with more intense 
and bitter scorn by all who have read the story of his 
life than that able but singularly debased Louis of 
France, who made his headsman his prime minister 
and for the first time in history, perhaps, conferred 
upon a public executioner the highest " essentially 
executive " office of the realm. There is a story which 
the world counts almost too terrible for belief that one 



184 A MAN OF DESTINY. 

of the fierce fanatic leaders of the French revolution 
had some experience in the same ghastly business, and 
in the midst of that wild tide of frenzy used some- 
times to seek recreation in disguise in the exercise of 
his former profession. This story is not well authenti- 
cated, and may perhaps be regarded as the invention 
of some malign historian. 

In our own country public sentiment has been so 
generally averse to honoring this instrument of the 
law's authority that I believe you are not only the first 
instance in which such an one has been elevated to the 
chief magistracy of the nation, but probably the first 
who has ever exercised this very necessary function to 
citizenship, and afterwards been made the executive 
head of any of the states or a member of either house 
of congress. There are a few cases in Avhich one has 
been elected a member of a state legislature; but it is 
believed that even those for whom this questionable 
fate has been reserved have been very few. 

Perhaps the chief reason for this lies in the fact that 
very few men of aspiring character and statesmanlike 
ability — especially few who have reached the mature 
age at which you first consented to perform this revolt- 
ing task — have been willing to hold a position in which 
they might be required to discharge a duty so abhor- 
rent to the common instincts of humanity. Or if they 
did hold the position, shrunk from performing it with 
their own hands, employing instead, some hardened 
and degraded outcast, who, for a trivial consideration, 
was wilhng to lend his hand for the horrible work. 
There have been over-sensitive souls among us who 



A MAN OF DESTINY. 185 

have laid down the office which they held rather than 
be present, and even by the hands of another to dis- 
charge so hateful a duty. 

No doubt the course which you pursued was much 
more sensible. By doing the work yourself you showed 
a readiness to discharge the functions of an office " es- 
sentially executive in its character," however distasteful 
they miglit be to your feelings or abhorrent to the 
general sentiment of mankind. It showed, too, a thrifty 
regard for the pubhc purse which ought not to be lost 
sight of in estimating your fitness for the administration 
of public funds and the economical organization of the 
public service. By undertaking this disgusting labor 
you not only performed your legal duty to the very 
letter, but saved the expense of a hired hangman — not 
to the county, but to 3^ourself. This strict regard for 
the performance of public duty would furnish an edi- 
fying example to future ages, and no doubt be regarded 
as in some sort a guaranty of a like scrupulous care in 
the discharge of the higher and pleasanter functions 
which the presidency of the United States will devolve 
upon you, were it not for the peculiar flavor of parsi- 
mony which clings about even this lugubrious act, and 
the marked and notable contrast which it affords to 
your own conduct when called upon by the law of the 
land to perform the honorable, though dangerous, duty 
of a soldier. I suppose a hired executioner would have 
cost less than even the felon-substitute who represented 
you in the ranks of the nation's defenders. But 1 can- 
not deny that to one of jour temperament the impulse 
to secm^e the one must have been much greater than 



186 A MAN OF DESTINY. 

the incentive to employ the other. It seems to me 
that the two acts are entirely "harmonious in their 
character and tend very strongly to elucidate and 
confirm the view which I have taken of your 
moral and intellectual characteristics. I hope I 
may be pardoned if I go farther and say that this 
official act seems to me to shed some light upon your 
use of a political maxim which the country hitherto 
has found it somewhat difficult to apprehend. You 
will remember that on the most important occasion in 
your life you declared, almost in a breath, your sub- 
stantial harmony with the political views of the demo- 
cratic party, and your deliberate conviction that a 
" public office is a public trust." It is true that this 
latter phrase had by no means the merit of originality. 
In fact it is what those of our profession are wont to 
denominate " horn-book law." Perhaps hardly any 
noted jurist, since the days of Cicero at least, has ever 
thought of regarding a duty imposed by public author- 
ity as anything else than a public trust, meaning by 
that phrase a trust imposed upon a citizen for the 
public benefit. Because of your " smiling and unforced 
assent" to the recognized principles and practices of 
the democratic party at the very instant of making 
this declaration, however, it has been surmised that it 
bore a somewhat modified signification to your mind. 
It has even been intimated that you intended in this 
instance to speak with strict professional accuracy, 
recognizing the fact that a trust presumes three dis- 
tinct essentials — a trustor, a trustee, and one for whose 
benefit the trust is created, l^ow, while there is no 



A MAN OF DESTINY. 187 

question between parties or individuals in regard to 
the first two of these elements of the pubTic trust, as 
embraced within the purlieu of a public office, there is 
room for very great diversity of opinion in regard to 
the proper and rightful cestioi que trust. While a 
trust in some cases may be properly and rightfully 
created for the contingent or ultimate behoof of the 
trustee, yet it would be the height of absurdity for 
one to be made for the benefit of the trustor. 
Though there is perhaps no absolute legal obstacle to 
the creation of such a trust, yet it would be so incon- 
sistent with the ordinary course of business, and the nat- 
ural inclination of the human mind, that it might even 
be held to be contra honos mores. With this in mind, 
and remembering your inherent moral characteristics, 
it has been intimated that while regarding a public 
office as a public trust, you have been not averse to 
accepting the time-honored democratic principle that it 
is a trust created, not for the benefit of the trustor — 
the too confiding pubhc — but for the direct and 
especial emolument of the trustee, and the ultimate 
advantage of the party to which he belongs, and to 
whose favor he owes the privilege of administering the 
said trust. It has occurred to me that the tlirifty 
readiness with which you took upon yourself the func- 
tions and emoluments of the common hangman at the 
mature age of thirty -five or thereabouts, may serve to 
confirm this view of the interpretation which you 
place upon this time-honored maxim. 

The opportunity is presented to you, sir, to assist in 
overturning two very silly and no doubt unfounded 



188 A MA.N OF DESTIKY. 

prejudices. It was your fortune to be nominated for 
the exaltecl position which you are about to occupy 
upon a Friday. Considering your peculiar relation to 
the rites which are ordinarily performed upon that day, 
this was, to say the least, a little peculiar. ]S'ot only 
this, but you are probably the only man who has ever 
been called upon to discharge both the functions of a 
hangman and of chief ruler of a great nation. Cer- 
tainly you are the first of whom we have any record, 
who, after securing a well-earned reputation for neat- 
ness and despatch in discharge of the lesser function, 
has been called by the voice of a free people to perform 
the greater. You are not, however, by any means the 
first man who, called with high hopes to be the execu- 
tive head of a nation has proved himself to be the exe- 
cutioner of a party. It is devoutly to be hoped that 
your experience in that office which so lately filled the 
measure of your hopes and aspiration, may not be with- 
out value to yourself and the country in the perform- 
ance of your new duties and especially in overthrowing 
the superstitious prejudices which cling around the 
headsman and his task and even give the flavor of ill- 
luck to the day which is consecrated to the perform- 
ance of his duties. 

Eespectfully, 
New York, February 23, 1885. SiVA. 



No. XY. 

WHO WILL BE PKESIDENT? 

To Geover Cleveland, President-Elect : 

3fy Dear Sir^ — In answer to the question " Who 
will be president ? " you are reported to have replied, 
somewhat tartly, " Grover Cleveland." It would, per- 
haps, have been as well if you had adopted the jocose 
language of Mr. Lincoln, who, as the story goes, once 
said that he hoped to have " some influence with the 
administration " during his second term, or the pru- 
dence of Mr. Edmunds, who casually announced to the 
assembled senate and house, that you "appear" to 
have been elected. The truth is that no man can be 
president except by and with the advice of some great 
political party. Of this party he must be either the 
head or the tail. Lie must command it as a leader or 
obey it as a servant. This naturally results from the 
antecedent relation between them. A man is nomi- 
nated as the exponent of the principles and policy of 
the party, and while no one supposes that as an official 
he is required to place the interests of the party above 
the welfare of the country or above his own convic- 
tions of right, yet his acceptance of the nomination is 
a pledge which no honorable man can avoid, that in the 
performance of his official duty he will act in harmony 
with the party he represents, and shape his administra- 
tion in conformity with its principles and practices. It 

189 



190 A MAN OF DESTINY. 

is true that circumstances quite overlooked at the time 
of the nomination may occur which may compel a man 
of honor and conscience to separate himself from his 
party and endeavor to establish apolicy entirely at vari- 
ance with its basis principles and in conflict with its 
general sentiment. 

There are not wanting in our later pohtical history 
examples of men who have attempted to ignore the 
claims of party in the position you are about to occupy, 
and sought to administer the oifice according to their 
own personal notions and ideas. Usually they have 
been men more distinguished for obstinacy and caprice 
than for sagacity and power. Indeed there are in all 
history few more forcible illustrations of the maxim 
that '' the stubborn man is always a weak one," than 
these attempts at presidential independence of party 
afford. It has come to be regarded as an undeniable 
fact by all careful observers of our political history 
that a president who puts himself without the pale of 
his party's favor and support becomes thereby the 
most lonesome and powerless of men. He may indeed 
hinder and obstruct his enemy, but he is powerless to 
aid his friends. To this it is possible that there may 
be two exceptions, to wit: A man that is willing to 
swing across the gulf that divides his party from its 
opponents, and fortunate enough to carrj^ with him 
sufficient strength to make a working majority, or an 
executive who is strong enough and popular enough to 
cut loose from all existing organizations and build up a 
new and independent party about himself. A man 
who was able to accomplish either of these remarkable 



A MAN OF DESTINY. 191 

feats has never yet appeared in onr history. Thus far 
the modern party has proved itself mightier than any 
man can hope to become. 

Tyler, FiUmore, and Johnson are notable instances 
of the failure of such attempts. Each of these con- 
ceived the idea that he could administer the govern- 
ment without his party's co-operation or advice. With 
two of these the result was that the president dragged 
the party down with him. In the other instance the 
aspirant for independent sovereignty only succeeded in 
burj^ing himself. Polk and Pierce are instances in 
which weak men have quietly yielded to the inevitable 
and submissively obe^^ed the party which the}^ had 
not power enough to lead. Buchanan believed himself 
the head of a party whose factions he by turns bullied 
and obej^ed. Under republican rule the president 
has generally been the actual head of the part}^ because 
of thorough sympathy with its princijDles and pur- 
poses. Mr. Hayes, the onl^^ exception to this rule, was 
so terrified by the uncertainties attending the com- 
mencement of his term that his chief anxiety seemed 
to be to secure its peaceful conclusion. Until the very 
closing days of his official life, therefore, he seemed 
much more desirous of conciliating his enemies than of 
encourao^inor- his friends. 

There is nothing in your character or antecedents to 
lead any reasonable man to suppose that you will at- 
tempt to prove yourself an exception to this rule. In- 
dependent self-achievement has not been a noticeable 
feature of 3^our life. You have been the instrument by 
which others have achieved success, rather than the 



192 A MAN OF DESTINY. 

architect of your own fortune. Had not the ambition 
and skill of another — a real though unassuming master 
of the politician's art — chained you to the chariot- 
wheel of democratic success, you are well aware that, 
instead of being on your triumphal way to the Avhite 
house, you would now be enjoying the undisturbed 
seclusion of bachelor quarters in a business block in 
Buffalo. The form of power is quite sufficient for you. 
As governor of the state of Xew York, it is very well 
known that, despite your boastful assertion of inde- 
pendence, 3^ou have been the most timorous and obse- 
quious of subservient figure-heads. One whose ambi- 
tion is wise enough to prefer the substance of power 
to the semblance of authority has dominated your in- 
tellect, controlled your volition and made you a half- 
unconscious puppet. You naturally look to this shrewd 
and sagacious man — this born prime minister — to take 
you creditably through the difficult part that has fallen 
to your lot. Whoever may compose your cabinet, he 
w411 be the counselor on whom you will rely. All that 
you will ask is that he should allow you to potter over 
insignificant details, whimperingly relate to those Avho 
care to listen the tribulations of your official state, and 
so preserve to the careless onlooker the precious fiction 
of actual power. 

This man — the alter ego in whose :£avor you have 
abdicated your own individuality — may be said in one 
sense to represent the best, and in another the worst, 
phases of the party w^ho has placed you in power. He 
represents its worst aspect in that his sole idea of 
statesmanship is the perpetuation of democratic as- 



A MAN OF DESTINY. 193 

cendency. He represents its best features in that he 
would achieve this purpose with the least possible det- 
riment to the public, as little violation of private right 
and as little infrequent use of improper methods as is 
consistent with the absolute certainty of accomplish- 
ment. As a politician he is built upon the model of 
Mr. Yan Buren, without Mr. Yan Buren's lust of per- 
sonal aggrandizement. He loves power for its own 
sake, but despises the tawdry shackles which rest upon 
the shoulders of those who only seem to rule. He is 
fond of chestnuts, but heedful of his own fingers. The 
tie between you is one of mutual obligation. The 
player needs a puppet just as much as the puppet needs 
a player. 

But this man, shrewd and resolute as he is, will not 
be the president. There is a power greater than he to 
which he will yield, because he is bold and sagacious, 
and which you will serve because without its aid you 
are more helpless and vulnerable than a lobster without 
its shell. To him this power is essential because it rep- 
resents the possibility, almost the certainty, of success. 
To you it is essential because it offers a shield from 
annoyance, a relief from responsibilit}^, and a possible 
refuge from the haunting fear of failure. This power 
is the controUing element of the democratic party. It 
is that vital sore which is fused to redness by intense 
hostility to those things which have constituted the ex- 
cellence and glory of the republican party. It em- 
braces practically every element from whom national 
humiliation and disaster have come in the past, and 
who have stubbornly opposed all those things that 
13 



IIM A MAN ()¥ DKSTINY. 

have added luster to the name of the repubhc. It 
numbers among its adherents all those who resisted 
every movement designed for the repression of 
slavery; who sustained the cause of the confederacy 
with bullets in the front of our armies and with ballots 
in the rear; who opposed by every possiVjle 'means the 
emancipation of the slave and the enfranchisement of 
the freedman ; who by violence and fraud rendered null 
and void the political privileges guaranteed by consti- 
tutional amendment, without regard to "race, color, or 
previous condition of servitude." It includes all those 
who favored the severance of the republic in twain; 
who appealed to arms against the decision of the legal 
tribunal of the land ; who made necessary the public 
debt which has burdened even our prosperity; who 
devastated the land with war, paralyzed its industries, 
drove our commerce from the seas, and shed the blood 
of a million of our best and bravest. It embraces all 
those wlio, after the close of the war, appealed to mid- 
night murder — organized violence and unblushing fraud 
to overwhelm the voice of the majority as well as those 
who justified assassination, offered excuse for fraud, 
and have profited by th(3 results. It embraces all those 
who still assert that the government of the United 
States and of its various constituent republics must 
and shall forever remain a " white man's government," 
and that no man having within his veins a trace of 
African blood shall exercise or en joy any political right 
or privilege except it be by the grace and favor of his 
white fellow citizen, and then only so long and so far 
as it shall be exercised and enjoyed in conformity with 



A MA>- OF JjESTISY. 195 

the will and pleasure and nnder the direction and con- 
trol of the white man. Its essentia] nucleus is made up 
of those elements Avhich plotted to weaken the power 
and impair the cTedit of the government in order tlmt 
treason might divide and destroy it. It is headed h 
men whose highest claim to leader-ship is the coura^ 
skiU and fortitude displayed in the attempt to destroy 
whose jjatriotisrn is avouched by the fact that the 
SLCtl\(Ay iL<nii.\\fil or secretly abandoned the nation ir. 
her hour of peril; whose statesmanship is demonstrated 
only by unrelenting? hostility to the extension of Uljavty 
and the establisiiment of civil and political equality. 
The capacity of this element for the direction and cor. 
trol of a self-governing cornmnnity is chiefly attested 
by the poverty and ignorance of the region which hi? 
been exclusively under their controL Their claim t^ 
superiority in statesmanlike qualities rests ultimate! 
upon the fact that, with all the advantages of which ii 
boasts, the south excels the north onlv in showinxr ten 
times the illiteracy among its natives, and one fifth tl^ 
average pr^^luctive capacity fc: « people. 

Outside of liiLs frlowin^r. a core clinir som*^; 

thousand of bewildered voters, attracted bv its inter; 
sity, I ' .1 the 1< ee, if at all, 

of its r are oi : diverse and 

incongruous character — old-time abolitionists, who join 
hands with the freedman's oppressors: prohi 
who ally themselves with the party that c^>-.. .. ^ 
rum-seller its most reliable worker; civil-ser\'ice re- 
formers who app<^^l to the followers of the prophet of 
'^-oils for aid- Arrogance, revenue, and a vague veam- 



196 A MAN OF DESTINY. 

ing for perfectibility are among the motives that actu- 
ate them. They remind the observer of bits of soft 
iron fragments clinging to a magnet, adding, indeed, 
greatly to its bulk and Aveight, but nothing to its 
power. Whenever the core which they conceal loses 
its vague and undefined attraction, or they shall be 
swept within the range of a more potential influence, 
they will drop away like insignificant atoms and add 
their bulk to the array of hostile forces. 

All of this your trusted monitor understands, and I 
believe even you vaguely comprehend its truth. I^one, 
however, so thoroughly realize their power and your 
dependence as those who constitute the central, fiery 
heart of the democratic body. The old pro-slavery, 
ex-confederate element of the democracy fully under- 
stand and apprehend the advantage offered by the 
present status of affairs. 

In all the qualities which assure political success this 
element stands unrivaled in the historj^ of our govern- 
ment. 'Not only is it rendered thoroughly homogene- 
ous by a common purpose, but nothing threatens even 
remotely to impair its harmony. From first to last it 
is composed of men who shrink from no responsibility. 
Not merely its leaders but its rank and file are men 
who know no doubt. They are affected by no scruples. 
They are swayed by no sentimental consideration for 
the rights of others. Whatever comports with their 
own ideas of interest or polic}^ they will have no hesi- 
tation in forcing upon the country by any means that 
may be in their power. In boldness, audacity, and 
singleness of purpose they cannot be excelled. In 



A MAN OF DESTINY. 



197 



numbers they may be said to embrace the entire white 
race south of Pennsylvania and Ohio. To them patri- 
otism and pohcy mean the interest of the south first 
and of the country afterward. They are no longer 
rebels or traitors. They have no desire to dismember 
or destroy the government. They fully appreciate the 
fact that it is a better thing to control the whole 
country than to possess a part of it. They have not 
the least desire to impair the national prosperity, but 
only to make its prosperity tributary to southern 
interest and southern ascendency. 

This element believes devoutly in itself, its capacity 
to rule and in the ultimate triumph of the ideas which 
it represents. It is honestly glad that the confederacy 
was overthrown, because in the events succeeding its 
downfall they clearly perceive their own unrivaled op- 
portunity. They are proud of the genius of govern- 
ment, the fortitude and daring which they have dis- 
played and the astounding success which has attended 
their later efforts. It is no wonder they look with 
contempt upon the manhood of the north and despise 
a people who threw away the fruits of victor}^ and 
allowed a conquered enem}^ to gain by audacity and 
fraud even more than they hoped to win by force of 
arms. It is no wonder that they are proud of their 
achievements. Within a generation they have seen 
themselves defying the power of the nation ; appealing 
to the arbitrament of the sword ; prostrated and hu- 
mihated by defeat; and now again victorious — con- 
trollers and arbiters of the nation's destiny. It is no 
wonder that they look with exultation upon their past, 



198 A MAN OF DESTINY. 

and regard with equanimity the employment of what- 
ever means may be necessary to perpetuate their power. 
This element is and must continue for at least a gener- 
ation to be the controlling and dominating influence in 
the councils of the democracy. This element will be 
the president. 

To them your success is only an opportunity. For 
you, as the representative of the democratic party of 
the north, they have little regard. For you individually 
they can only feel contempt. They are positive in all 
things. You are neutral in everything. They pride 
themselves first on their courage. Their achievements 
in war they count the highest attestation of their man- 
hood. These bronzed and mutilated veterans, the 
arrogant and dominating leaders of your party, bear- 
ing about in their persons even yet the leaden testi- 
monials of devotion to a doomed and failing cause, can- 
not but regard with scorn the man who sat by his 
lonely fireside and waited indifferently while the storm 
of war swept over the land. They were rebels, it is 
true, but heroes. On this they rest their justification 
and base their pride. When you seek to control them 
by persuasion, they will point you to the one hun- 
dred and fifty-eight electoral votes which they stand 
ready to deliver to the democratic party every four 
years for an indefinite period with the same cer- 
tainty and reliability that marks the recurrence of 
the sunrise. Thej^ will call to your mind the fact 
that without them the democratic part}^ is an impotent 
shadow, unable to command strength enough to sustain 
even a hope of victory within the life of the child that 



A MAN OF DESTINY. 199 

was born yesterday. Should" you dare to threaten, 
these men will proudly remind you of the fact that they 
climbed the slopes of Gettysburg, that they laughed 
amid the terrors of the AVilderness, and with attenuated 
lines lield at bay month after month the combined 
j)owers of the nation in front of Petersburg. They 
will tell you, and tell you to your face, that since the 
surrender at Appomattox, after the establishment of 
the nation's power throughout the once rebellious 
territory, they have taken their lives in their hands, 
have defied a victorious enemy and the law of the land, 
making themselves accessories before the fact in whole- 
sale slaughter to secure democratic supremacy in those 
states from which tliree-fourths of your electoral 
strength has come. They will tell you that they did 
these things in support of what they deemed southern 
rights, for the establishment and defense of southern 
principles, and the maintenance of southern interests. 
They will make you feel, sir, that evil as may have been 
their lives, dangerous as may have been their ante- 
cedents, questionable as is their right to rule, that no 
man who shranlv and cowered by the glowing grate in 
his bachelor quarters, while swords flashed and trumpets 
clanged, can presume to rebuke or resist them. They 
are men who have dared and suffered too much in 
order to secure their present opportunity to be balked 
of their will by the peevish whinings of a dull-witted, 
self -pi tying poltroon. They will be president. 

They know their power. They do not have to wait 
even for the formality of an election in order to ascer- 
tain and declare their strength. The " solid south," 



200 A MAN OF DESTINT. 

the undivided and indivisible electoral potency of six- 
teen states stands behind them to enforce their demand. 
With them are the issues of life and death. They can 
kill and make alive. They have little to ask in the 
way of power and much to give. They know and 
despise the mercenary weakness of their northern alhes. 
They know that the cohesive power of public plunder, 
rather than belief in distinctive principles or aspira- 
tions for the public good, controls the major part of 
those to whose co-operation they look to supplement 
their strength and secure a continuance of democratic 
ascendency. They know that whatever you or your 
counselors may desire, the democratic party of the 
north will stand by them in any demands they may 
make. They know that the hope of democratic vic- 
tory in all but one of the states of the north depends 
upon the maintenance of democratic ascendency in the 
nation. Their allies of the north have everything to 
win by securing their co-operation, while the democ- 
racy of the south has hardly anything to lose by 
national defeat. 

They are splendid diplomats, as well as magnificent 
soldiers, these bourbon leaders of the south. They 
are not easily affected by the mere hope of personal 
gain. The temptation of political preferment and 
pecuniary advantage, dangled before their e3^es for 
years by the republican party, was not sufficient to 
induce any considerable number to renounce the ideas 
to which they stood committed and the cause in whose 
triumph the}^ have never ceased to believe. They are 
not indifferent to the advantages to be derived from the 



A MAN OF DESTINY. 201 

control of national power and material resources, but 
you will learn to admit, sir, that, unlike j^-our northern 
associates, their minds are not fixed with frenzied greed 
upon mere personal opportunities. They laugh at such 
petty ambition. Their aspiration is higher. Their 
demand is greater. They seek to make the prosperity 
of the north tributary to the advantage and power of 
the south. The mouths of the Mississippi — poor dumb 
mouths though they be — cry like the daughter of the 
horse-leech for more. Coasts and bays and inlets yearn 
for bountiful improvements. Nature has been lavish 
in providing them with ports and harbors. "Where none 
have been created, they naturally yearn that havens 
should be made. They are not ashamed to plead 
poverty — these reckless partisans who have wrested 
victory from defeat. They are ready to allege the im- 
poverishment of war in support of their demand for 
national charity. They are ready to make the freed- 
man's weakness and ignorance the excuse for alms from 
the national treasury, two thirds of which would go 
to the support of white schools. 

This element holds the key of the political situation. 
It says to the democracy of the north, " Give us forty- 
odd votes only, and 3^our power shall be continued 
indefinitely." They have no fear of public opinion. 
They scorn the sentimentality which pays worship to 
their chivalry. They are practical statesmen of the 
most efficient type. They believe that a democratic 
administration can easily secure the narrow margin of 
electoral votes necessary to perpetuate its power. They 
know that the democratic party of the north believes 



202 A MAN OF DESTINY. 

this also, and desires it to be done. They know you 
will learn very speedily that any democratic president 
who seeks to foil their wishes, limit or restrain their 
desires, will find himself as powerless as an infant and 
as hopeless as they who enter the confines of Gehenna. 

Before boasting, then, of yonr intention to control 
your administration, it would be well for you to recall 
your favorite aphorism, " The stream cannot rise above 
its source." You know jou solemnly declared during 
the campaign that this was a physical and moral truth 
that admitted of no exception. Apply it now to your 
own case, remembering that you are not the source of 
power nor even the stream, but only the spigot through 
which it drips or splutters according to its head. The 
source of the power of which you will be the orifice of 
distribution is the democratic party. Its true level is 
that of the southern bourbon element, which consti- 
tutes its chief strength. Whether the stream will rise 
to the level of the fountain can only be ascertained by 
determining the true elevation of supply and comparing 
this with your moral altitude. 

Yours respectfully, 

Siva. 

New York, February 25, 1885. 



]sro. XVI. 

MOYHSTG m. 

To Grover Cleveland, President-Elect : 

3fy Dear Sir, — The end has come. In your opinion 
the dream of destiny is complete. You Jiave reached, 
as you fondly imagine, the highest round upon the lad- 
der of fame, and have henceforth only to maintain 
your balance at this dizzy elevation until one comes to 
relieve you. To-day your name will be enrolled in 
that brilhant category of men whom the American 
nation have chosen to exercise its power, maintain its 
dignit}^, and secure its prosperity, ^o monarchy was 
ever able to point to a line of sovereigns so uniformly 
capable and patriotic. They have not all been equally 
worthy, but taken as a whole they have established 
bevond question the fact that a self-governing people 
in selecting their temporary rulers very rarely make 
mistakes. By far the greater portion of them have 
been men to whom this signal preferment has come as 
the recognition and reward of great achievement. 
Some of them like yourself, though in a far less degree, 
liave been apparently creatures of accident. In a few 
instances they were comparatively unknown until their 
nomination inspired inquiry into their previous record. 
Only once before, however, or possibly twice, has one 
been elevated to the presidency who had not thereto- 
fore served in one or both houses of congress or won 

303 



204 A MAN OF DESTEST. 

distinction on the field of battle. Although we have 
been a peaceful nation, priding ourselves upon recogniz- 
ing civic merit rather than yielding to the glamour of 
mihtary glory, it is a singular fact that among those 
who have been chosen to that office hitherto, there are 
but two who had not at some period of their careers 
offered their lives for the national defense or had a price 
set upon their heads as pestilent enemies of his majesty, 
the king of England. Of the earlier presidents, Wash- 
ington, Madison and Monroe were soldiers of the revo- 
lution. Jefferson and the elder Adams being members 
of the continental congress and the executive council, 
were practically military commanders and enjoyed the 
distinguished honor of having a price set upon their 
heads. Jackson was the foremost military hero of his 
day. Harrison owed his election to the courage and 
ability he had displayed in several Indian campaigns. 
Polk saw service in the Creek war. The laurels of 
Mexico were fresh upon the broAV of Taylor. Pierce had 
w^on distinction upon the same fields. Buchanan was 
a volunteer of the war of 1812. Lincoln was a captain 
in the Black Hawk w^ar. To the generalship of Grant 
you owe the fact that you are permitted to assume the 
presidency of an undivided nation. Mr. Hayes not 
only served with credit in the Avar to preserve the 
Union, but avouched his patriotism Avith his blood. 
Garfield placed his fame above the possibility of eclipse 
wdien he brought Thomas' succoring legions upon the 
field at Chickamauga. 

Of the two exceptions to this rule, the younger 
Adams may well be held excusable. But nine years 



A MAN OF DESTINY. 205 

old at the outbreak of the revolution, before he was 
twelve he shared his father's peril in running the 
gauntlet of British cruisers with a price upon his head 
upon an embassy to France. When the war of 1812 
came on he was already our ambassador at St. Peters- 
burg. Though he never performed, nor, so far I am 
aware, offered to perform, a soldier's duty, there can be 
no doubt that had opportunity offered for serving his 
country in such capacity neither private interest nor 
personal inclination would have prevented him from 
doing so. 

Of the other I speak with some hesitancy. I do not 
find the fact related in the fragmentary history of his 
eventful life, but I seem to remember hearing the 
"Warwick of Xew York" declare in palliation of his 
shortcomings that Martin Yan Euren at one time 
volunteered in the service of his country. I mention 
it with hesitation, and am glad to give to him the bene- 
fit of the doubt. If it should be that in this charitable 
conclusion I am in error, it will be a singular fact that 
the only presidents who can be fairly said to have 
neglected such opportunity to serve the country, as well 
as the only ones who deliberately and purposely shirked 
such service, have both hailed from the state of JN'ew 
York. It is a distinction which the Empire state could 
well afford to forego. The few exceptions to this rule 
prove conclusively that the American people have 
always counted courage and patriotism as the first and 
most essential qualifications for the headship of the 
nation. 

ISTot only is this true, but almost every one who has 



206 A MAN OF DESTINY. 

occupied that official residence, so fitly named the 
white house, since first Mrs. Abigail Adams put up 
her clothes-line and hung the family washing to dr}^ in 
the "great unfurnished audience-room," has been a 
man whose private worth and domestic character fairly 
entitled him to be cited as an exemplar in an}^ Amer- 
can home. Ah, there have been many sweet domestic 
scenes enacted within that rambling structure around 
which centers the pride of the American people! A 
blameless life the rugged Xew England patriot led 
there with the wise and tender Abigail to whom I 
have referred. It is a pleasant thing to recall the 
heroism of that quaint compound of Virginia aristocrat 
and Philadelphia Quaker, standing beside her husband 
while the cannon boomed at Bladensburg, assisting 
James Madison to collect and secrete his papers, and 
then hastening and sharing his flight not a moment 
too soon to escape capture by the British grenadiers. 
The hero of New Orleans entered the portals of "that 
great palace," whose gloom his Eachel dreaded, with 
head bowed in sorrow from that recent bereavement 
which closed the sad story of his romantic love. In 
more recent years the tender domestic life of Lincoln 
and Grant and Garfield has hallowed its pleasant 
rooms and left a store of pretty childish traditions 
clinging in its nooks and crannies. 

Here, too, have been held many notable conclaves 
on which the fate of the nation has ofttimes depended, 
and the fragrance of the most exalted patriotism hal- 
lows corridor and chamber. It was the central scene 
of our nation's greatest tragedy. In every crisis of the 



A MAN OF DESTINY. 207 

war it was the fountain from which flowed hope and 
faith and courage. The tradition of the great hbera- 
tor's presence is more vivid and pervading than that of 
any other of its occupants. Here was held the memor- 
able council which passed upon the immortal proclama- 
tion submitted to his ministers in the handwriting of 
its great author. Here the generals who commanded 
our armies were wont to come for counsel, encourage- 
ment, and moral strength from the wise and patient 
man who cared nothing for the paraphernalia of rank 
or power, who dreamed not of ease or comfort or 
renown, but lived only for the nation's good and the 
uplifting of humanity. Here Garfield " languishing did 
live " through the terrible days while the hushed heart 
of the nation poured forth perpetual prayer that he 
might not perish. 

Across its threshold one can hardly pass without the 
most profound and tender emotions. It is the sanc- 
tuary around which cluster the nation's holiest mem- 
ories. Its traditions should inspire in the dullest nature 
a self- forgetful devotion to the interests of the nation 
and the universal good of humanity. If one might 
only believe that these solemn memories would touch 
your heart, inspire your life, and make you indeed a 
man of destiny, the nation might well rejoice. Unfort- 
unately for such aspiration, with 3^ou enters not only 
the past, which has stamped itself ineffaceably upon 
your nature, but also that arrogant and reckless power 
to which you owe your elevation, and which holds a 
mortgage on your future. The man Avho enters to-day 
the nation's holy of holies and undertakes the molding 



208 A MAN OF DESTINY. 

V; 
of a people's fate and perhaps an age's destiny, is the 
sanie man who stood coolly by while the nation's life 
hung trembling in the balance, doing no act and speak- 
ing no Avord for lier deliverance. If called upon to 
choose this day between her safety and his own, 
between her prosperity and his individual advantage, 
between her fame and his exaltation, between her life 
and his life, who shall say which alternative he would 
accept? "Would he, like Captain James Madison, be 
" the last representative of the government to leave his 
post," and only depart when the capitol was in the 
enemy's hands ? Would he calm the waves of panic 
should treason again hurl back the national forces, 
shattered and dismayed, from another Bull Eun ? Would 
he take counsel of his duty or of his destiny should 
foreign warfare or domestic turmoil demand of him the 
inspiration of a great example? Would he, as com- 
mander-in-chief of the army and navy, seek a substitute 
to represent him should the roar of cannon echo again 
along the Potomac ? 

It is not for me to answer these questions. Patriot- 
ism and courage are such common virtues that there 
could be little doubt in ordinary cases, l^ot one of 
your predecessors would have flinched. That every- 
body knows. But then not one of your predecessors 
had shirked a soldier's duty and scorned a soldier's op- 
portunity. Only your past can prophesy of your future. 
I sincerely wish that in it I might trace the promise of 
a worthy and patriotic career. There was a time, my 
dear sir, when even I had hope. I will even admit that 
until the very last minute I did not despair. I saw 



A MAN OF DESTINY. 209 

^Yithin your grasp the opportunity for at once acquir- 
ing nndying and achieving boundless fame without a 
chance of miscarriage or the possibiHty of faikire. I 
knew your greed for renown, and hoped you would im- 
prove it. I am almost ashamed to confess, now that 
this hope has failed, that I ever indulged so vain a 
delusion. I ought to have known 3^ on better, or rather 
to have trusted more fully to the prognosis based upon 
the essential attributes of your character and the reve- 
lations of your past life. 

Tlie truth is, that I was the more inclined to hope 
because of a sudden change you made in the words you 
were accustomed to use in self -description. Your adop- 
tion of the term "destiny" instead of "luck," as you 
were formerly won't to phrase your idea of the good 
fortune which came to you without conscious effort or 
perceptible desert, seemed to me very significant. I 
thought it argued a juster appreciation of the relations 
between yourself and others, and seemed almost to 
imply a recognition of reciprocal duty and obligation. 
Destiny is unquestionably a better and broader word 
than luck. It stands upon a higher plane, of thought. 
It is applied to noble natures, higher duties, and more 
exalted aims. It is inseparably connected with that 
uncomprehended power which " takes a step and ages 
have rolled away." Destiny applies only to the acts 
of the Almighty and to such beings and essences as 
are great enough to be especial objects of His care or 
instruments of ^is will. It may be that not a sjiarrow 
falleth to the ground without knowledge of the infinite 
presence, but neither the sparrow's fall nor the eagle's 
14 



210 A MAN OF DESTINY. 

fate is sufficient to waken in the human mind the 
thouglit of destiny. It is only when nations exult or 
people mourn, when history writes upon her page the 
record of some grand achievement, such as the rise or 
fall of an empire, that the idea of destin}^ comes in- 
stinctively to every mind. In all the world's history 
there are hardly a dozen names to whom is linked the 
supreme privilege of being accounted the children of 
destiny. Every one of these brings to mind at once an 
epoch in the world's life. They were men whom a 
chUd may perceive have flexed the current of human 
fate for generations, perhaps for centuries. That you 
should desire to be accounted one of these seemed to me 
a most natural and praiseworthy aspiration. That you 
should "for a moment suppose you might become a 
child of destiny without suffering and endeavor, 
without conceiving greater purposes and doing 
o-reater thino's than other men, never once entered 
my mind It was only when I saw you plum- 
ing yourself upon being a man of destiny as a fact 
accomplished, tlmt I began to realize how far you were 
from apprehending the true significance of the term. 
I shall never fall into such error again. Others may 
be deceived with the idea that you may yet be stimu- 
lated by patriotic devotion to the accomplishment of 
heroic deeds. Others may believe that you are en- 
dowed with that far-reaching, keen, and marvelous 
appreciation of the needs and welfare of the nation as 
will impel you to ignore all other considerations and 
base your action in the exalted position to which you 
have been chosen, only upon a profound conviction as to 



A MAN OF DESTINY. 21 1 

what will conserve the greatest good of the greatest 
number. As forme, while I shall not be misled by any 
such specious pretense of disinterestedness, I shall be 
quite content if from any motive whatever you can be 
induced to act as if you were really inspired by the 
motives which the overwhelming charity of the 
American people stands ready to attribute to you. I 
am not deceived by the trite declaration that 3^ou pro- 
pose to be tlie "president neither of the north, of the 
south, of the east, or of the west." Most unfortunately 
for all this threadbare aphorism applies to you with 
singular force and significance. 

President of the north you cannot be, because be- 
tween its hfe and your own no harmony of aspiration 
has ever existed. Alike of its perils and its triumphs 
you have remained a passive and unmoved spectator. 
Your withers have never been wrung with any thrill 
of agony in contemplating its distress. Of its one 
great distinctive moral attribute — an undying and irre- 
pressible love for the welfare of others — 3"our nature 
has never shown a trace. Of that active benevolence 
and unbounded charity which stamps our northern life 
as unique in all the world's history, which will not let 
the oppressed of any land, and more especially of their 
own, suffer beneatli the whip of injustice for any con- 
siderable time, you liave never exhibited the faintest 
appreciation. Of the north you cannot be the presi- 
dent, because your life touches its life only at that 
infinitesimal point where the circle of your selfhood 
impinges on its mighty circumference. 

You cannot be president of the south, because you 



212 A MAN OF DESTINY. 

not only do not know its life, but care to know only 
so much of its true significance as may save you from 
annoyance and prevent actual rupture betwixt its inher- 
ently hostile elements during your oiRcial term. Of 
the east you cannot be president, because you are 
unable to realize that below the carping, censorious 
spirit that shows upon the surface is a manhood from 
which has sprung the freedom, the glory, and the aspi- 
ration of the north and the west. To you the east has 
been no place of light. You have learned no lessons 
from its history, and have gathered into your person- 
ality none of the elements of its greatness. 

As for the west — that most wondrous miracle of the 
world's life, that marvelous force which has spanned 
in a brief lifetime the mighty distance between bar- 
barism and the forefront of the world's enlightenment — 
of this realm of infinitely multiplied capabilities, you 
cannot be the president, because you are as ignorant 
of its greatness as you are unable to a])prehend its sig- 
nificance. 

Of the whole, it is possible that you should be presi- 
dent, not merely by induction into your liigh office, 
not merely by the sanction of your official oath, not 
alone by recognition at the hands of those confederated 
communities which constitute the nation, nor even as 
the representative in the eyes of the world of the 
nation's ]iower, but by that " all-hail of the hereafter " 
which marks the grandest of all success, the harmony 
betwixt leader and people, betwixt aspiration and 
accomplishment, betwixt life and fame. 

Though you have missed the grandest opportunity 



A MAX OF DESTINY. Zlo 

ever offered to one in your position, 3^011 may yet 
achieve an enviable fame by keeping steadily before 
your mind the fact that yonr personal renown is in- 
separable from tiie common weal. If you^ strive to do 
rather than seek to avoid ; if you trample under your 
feet the hopes of faction and party; if you cast to the 
wind all thought of perpetuating the power of that 
marvelous organization which seeks to make you its 
instrument; if you have the manhood to do those 
things which they desire you not to do — if you dare to 
balk with inflexible will their greed for public plunder; 
if you are brave enough to lay bare the iniquities of 
bourbon usurpation at the south and appeal to the 
nation to apply an effectual and immediate remed}^; if 
you are willing to stand four years in the glaring focus 
of democratic hate, to be stretched day after day upon 
the seven-fold heated gridiron of their scorn, contumely 
and ridicule; if you dare face the pains of hell for a quad- 
renniate — if you are brave enough and strong enough 
and wise enough to do these things, the eternal years of 
glory whicii come to those whom destiny has chosen for 
its own may yet be yours. In that you may be written 
down in history, not merely as the president of the 
whole country, nor even as the first president of a 
reunited land, but as the head and president of a land 
forevermore inseparable — the forerunner of an era 
incomparable in the history of the world. 

Kespectfully, 
New York, March 4, 1885. SiVA. 



Xo. XYII. 
TO-MOEEOW^S MOEEOW. 

To Geoyee Cleveland, Peesident : 

Si7\ — The influence of an evil example is so greatly 
magnified by the accident of success, that I cannot but 
look with the gravest apprehension upon the effect 
which your elevation is likely to exert upon the future 
of our country. Momentous as are the political and 
economic evils which seem likely to result from the 
ascendency of the democratic party, dominated and 
controlled by its southern bourbon element, they 
are hardly more serious than the debasement of the 
American ideal which must show itself as a remoter 
consequence. 

There can be no doubt that upon all the questions of 
human right leadiag up to, and culminating in the war 
of rebellion, the republican party was either right 
or wrong. If it was right, then the dejnocratic party 
of the ante-helhtm days, the statesmen of the south, the 
advocates and apologists of slavery everywhere, were 
wrong. If the republican party was in the right, then 
the promoters of rebellion, the leaders and upholders of 
the confederacy were in the wrong. If the republican 
party was in the right and the emancipation of tlie slave 
and the enfranchisement of tiie freedman were acts of 
eternal justice and sound and enlightened policy, then the 
democratic party, which opposed these acts, was again 

214 



A MAl^ OF DESTINY. 215 

in error. If the republican party was right in emanci- 
pating the slave and enfranchising the freedman, then 
that portion of the democratic party ^Yho banded them- 
selves together to kill, beat, mutilate and terrify colored 
voters, until the race was prevented by fear of death 
from exercising the citizen's prerogative, were guilty 
of a grievous wrong. If it was right that the slave 
should be freed and that the freedman should be 
enfranchised, then they who having seized by violence 
the power of the majoritv continued to hold and enjoy 
the same by fraudulent debasement of the ballot and 
by manipulation of the laws of the several states, so as 
to facilitate the repression of free speech and prevent 
a free expression of the popular will at the polls, were 
guilty of the most flagrant wrong. If it be wrong to 
acquire power by murdering those who do not concur 
with us in political opinion, by terrifying the weak, by 
defrauding the ignorant, by prostituting the forms of 
law and falsifying the results of elections, then the 
democratic party is guilty of the most heinous Avrong 
in profiting by the results of crime and securing national 
ascendency thereby. 

The law which rewards good and punishes evil may 
well be thought divine, since it springs out of the im- 
mutable principle of cause and effect. If we consider 
its application to be limited to this vale of time, we 
shall not always find it true of the individual. It does 
not admit of doubt that ''. in the corrupted currents of 
this Avorld," evil not only often escapes visible punish- 
ment but builds up exceptional prosperity on the pro- 
ceeds of crime. When applied to nations, however, the 



216 A MAN OF dp:stiny. 

rule is inexorable. Death never comes to them to in- 
terrupt the operation of nature's laws. "As ye sow, so 
shall ye also reap," is a law from the operation of 
which no people may escape. To-day may not see its 
complete fulfillment, but some to-morrow must behold 
its vindication. 'No nation can do evil or omit to do 
rio^ht without reaping in the future the scathful harvest 
of unrighteousness. 

Of this truth your election and the ascendency of 
your party in the national councils are themselves most 
striking illustrations. Had not the nation failed in its 
plain duty toward its citizens there could have been no 
such result. It may have been unwise to have enfran- 
chised the freedman, but when once clothed with the 
robe of citizenship there can be no doubt about the duty 
of the nation to protect him in the exercise of its duties 
and the enjoyment of its privileges. In a free govern- 
ment the debasement of the ballot is the swiftest and 
surest harbinger of decay. What then shall we antici- 
pate for our count] y when well nigh a million voters 
are debarred the exercise of this right and the verdict 
of the nation falsified thereb\^ ? 

You are yourself the answer — you and your associ- 
ates. It was for this very purpose, in part at least, 
that this unparalleled crime was committed. They 
who dipped their hands in the blood of thousands of 
peaceful citizens, in order to deter their fellows from 
exercising the prerogative of citizenship, did so in the 
first instance in order that they might usurp the power 
of the individual states. To this overthrow of estab- 
lished authority by organized assassination the nation 



A MAN OF DESTINY. 217 

was strangely apathetic. Its people seemed not to 
recognize the fact either that it was their own sover- 
eignty that was being thus murclerousl}^ defied or that 
those who were engaged in this gigantic conspiracy to 
overthrow the power of the majority in the several 
states were the very men who within a decade had 
sought by force of arms a dismemberment of the Union. 
So the f reedman was not protected in his right and the 
new rebellion was allowed to take its own course and 
to achieve its immediate purpose aluiost without re- 
buke. 

Then dawned the day of retribution. Xo sooner had 
conspirators usurped the power of the states tlian they 
transformed them into forces acting througli a])parently 
legitimate channels, by means of the federative charac- 
ter of the repubhc, for tlie humiliation and overthrow 
of that political power which had balked the designs 
of treason, given liberty to the slave and the ballot to 
the f reedman. Of this conspiracy you are the result — in 
yourself insignificant enough, but in the facts 3"0u 
typify terrible indeed. 

In the eyes of the world democratic ascendency in 
the nation, secured by the undivided support of those 
who upheld confederate power, of all who sympathized 
with rebellion, and by far the larger number of those 
who sustained the rightfulness and lawfulness of slavery, 
must mean these things : 

Twenty years from the day the confederacy 
was overthrown in battle they have secured con- 
trol of the whole country, of which they then 
sought to rule only a part. 



218 



A MAN OF DESTINY. 



As this ascendency was secured by the nulli- 
fication of national law and the suppression of 
the colored vote throughout the south by avowed 
terrorism and legalized fraud, it is fair to infer 
that the nation is willing to abandon the position 
taken in tlie enfranchisement of the colored man. 



The dominating and controlling element of 
the party in power being the active supporters 
of slavery, who received the mental, moral and 
religious impressions that have shaped their lives 
from that institution, it is fair to infer that the 
people of the country consider slavery a better 
training-school for statesmen than liberty. 



The vital element of the party at the head of 
the government consisting of those persons who 
won distinction in tlie confederate service, sup- 
ported by the entire rebel element of the south 
and all those who sympathized with rebellion 
at the north, it is fair to infer that the nation 
desii'es to reward treason, considers the over- 
throw of the confederacy an injustice to the 
south and esteems the man who fought for its 
dismemberment more worthy than the man who 
fought for the preservation of the Union. 

As a free people within twenty years from the 
close of a most exhaustive war and the over- 
throw of the most formidable and desperate 
rebellion in liistory passed b}^ a half -million of 



A MAN OF DESTINY. 219 

veterans of the struggle and pitched upon a con- 
script who refused to serve even when drafted, 
for the highest place \vithin their gift, it is fair 
to conclude that the American people prefer a 
conscript Avho evades a dangerous service de- 
manded of him by the country to a soldier who 
volunteers to fight her battles for her. 



You and they — the unwilling conscript of the north 
and the arrogant ex-confederates of the south — men 
steeped to the very hps in all the barbarous notions and 
baleful influences of slavery, " a2?pear " to have been 
chosen by a free people as the exponents of their sense 
of justice, the true standard of their patriotic aspiration 
and the most capable instruments for administering the 
national authority that American life has produced. 
Should you be accepted by the future as the legitimate 
result of the American experiment of government hy 
the people^ coming generations Avill learn from your 
elevation, the ascendency of your party and the res- 
toration of the south to its old position of national 
domination ; that treason is more likely to secure popu- 
lar approval in the republic than loyalty ; that evasion 
of public duty is the first step toward obtaining the 
highest political preferment ; that obscuritv is the 
surest passport to renown ; that non-achievement is 
the first pre-requisite for the discharge of the highest 
public functions ; that midnight murder and wholesale 
fraud are the cheapest and most effective methods of 
obtaining political power, and that all of these elements 
are essential to the perfection of American manhood, 



220 A MAN OF DESTINY. 

and constitute the ripest fruit of self-government and 
the civilization of the nineteenth century. For this 
result vou must assuredly stand, unless you break your 
bonds and plant yourself upon the very principles 
which the republican party proclaimed but failed to 
carry into full effect. I say these things, not as a par- 
tisan nor as an enemy, but as one of the many milHons 
whose servant you have become by installation into the 
highest office in the great republic. 

EespectfuUy, Siva. 



TO THE PEESIDE:^T. 
No. XYIII. 

My task is ended ; yours begun. I shall not stay to 
see the end. Death has already entered his caveat 
against such expectation. I cannot, ho^yever, doubt 
the result. The problem of self-government which 
God has appointed to be re-solved upon this continent 
by the American people will be fairly and righteously 
wrought out for guidance of the after ages. Whether 
it be achieved by peaceful means, or worked out in 
blood and tears, it matters little. Charged with the 
grandest message to humanity that has ever been 
intrusted to any people; consecrated to the cause of 
universal liberty by the freely-offered blood of heca- 
tombs of her children, no thoughtful man can doubt 
that "the Power that hath made and preserves us a 
nation" will see to it that the republic fulfils her great 
and manifest destiny. 

The fact that a party such as you represent, whose 
creature you are, and whose instrument 3^ou must be, 
should be able to place in the position you will strive 
in vain to fill one so notably unprepared for the work 
of the statesman, so exceptionally barren of worthy 
achievement, so apparently dead to all appreciation of 
the pubhc welfare, and so utterly insensible to all 
2)atriotic impulses, is a fact well calculated to impair 
confidence in the ultimate result of the great experi- 

221 



222 A MAX OF DESTINY. 

ment of self-government by a free people. The tri- 
umph of evil is always so marked and striking in the 
apparently overwhelming and irremediable character 
of its results, that even the most sanguine lover of 
truth is apt to forget that though the ratchet-wheel 
of progress sometimes does not permit the world to 
move forward as rapidly as we may wish, it never 
allows it to slip backward. There are periods in his- 
tory when conscience slumbers and overwrought aspi- 
ration becomes dull and feeble. 

Such a period is the present. The American people 
have taken marvelous strides within a generation. They 
have not only wrought innumerable material miracles, 
but in self-sacrifice, in devotion to the right and in the 
uplifting of humanity they have outstripped the wildest 
dreamer's hopes. Burdens that would have tasked a 
cycle have been laid upon the shoulders of a generation. 
The world* wonders, and Avill long wonder at our 
achievements. Xo people can be kept always at such a 
height. The bent bow must relax; the weary brain 
and overstrained heart must rest. Such an epoch of 
activity and exaltation is naturally followed by a sea- 
son of languor and depression. Such a time is always 
the opportunity of evil. The echoes of the song of 
deliverance had hardly died away when the murmur- 
ings of the wilderness began. Whenever iniquity has 
been trampled under foot by advancing right, it is sure 
to spring up again and cumber the pathway of human- 
ity until it is ground to powder under the feet of many 
generations. ]^o evil is ever eradicated in an hour. 
Your elevation marks the resuscitation of forces Avhich 



A MAN OF DESTINY. 223 

the world thought dead. For a time they will again 
rule the land. It is not a, triumph of the principles 
they represent, nor a legitimate result of self-govern- 
ment. It is merely the unconscious relaxation of over- 
strained moral fibre — the languid apathy of over- 
Avrought patriotism. You were not chosen because of 
what you have been, what you have done, what you 
represent, or what you are. The result was obtained 
onl}^ b}^ an ignorance of the essential attributes of your 
nature, as impenetrable as the veil which conceals the 
countenance of the false prophet of the desert. It 
indicates no change of purpose, no moral retrogression, 
no inclination to abandon the glorious achievements of 
the last quarter of a century, on the part of the Amer 
can people. It only means that for a time the land 
must lie in fallow. Its condition for a season must be 
that of the barren fig tree — 3^ou and your party repre- 
senting the stimulating agencies which the good gar- 
dener will apply. 

Already while the words of 3^our official oath are yet 
upon your lips, ere your jDresidential life has numbered 
the minutes of its first hour, the seal of failure has been 
indelibly stamped upon it. You have made, sir, in 3^our 
curious career one public declaration which, if it had 
been followed by consistent action showing your con- 
viction of its truth and a resolute purpose to maintain 
and uphold the right and rebuke and destro}^ evil, 
would in this hour have caused your name to be in- 
scribed beside that of Washington and Lincoln — not a 
hair's breadth below either — as the third person in the 
matchless trial of our immortals. It cannot be un- 



224 A MAN OF DESTINY. 

known to you, for it is common knowledge to all who 
live in our land, that but for. the wholesale and unpar- 
alleled ravishment of right, but for the suppression of 
the voice of the majority in half a dozen states whose 
electoral power was essential to your elevation, the 
late president of the senate could not have declared 
that " Grover Cleveland, of the state of 'New York," 
appeared " to have been elected president of the United 
States." You know, because it is universally admitted 
and your adherents at the south do not deny or wish 
to deny, that if the national enactment had not been 
violated, if the guaranties of the constitution had not 
been set at naught, if individual right had not been 
universally invaded, if organized violence had not 
established a reign of terror that paralyzed the action 
and sealed the mouths of a million voters, if wholesale 
fraud and iniquity sanctioned and upheld by the forms 
of law had not debauched the verdict of the ballot-box 
— if these things had not existed in that part of the 
nation where slavery garnered its abundant harvest of 
ignorance and weakness, you would not now be wear- 
ing the title of president or placidly enjoying the 
dream of power. 

Your profession, sir, renders it impossible that you 
should not know that he who benefits by the result of 
evil deeds stands upon the same moral level with the 
perpetrator of crime. As the recipient of ravished 
power you stand upon the necks of those who have 
been deprived of the freeman's dearest right by a sys- 
tem of organized violence unmatched in the history of 
murderous conspiracy, and a system of fraud un- 



A MAN OF DESTINY. 225 

equaled in extent, enormity and the debasement of the 
forms of law. You stand before the world as the 
guilty receiver of the freeman's stolen birthright. You 
know that if it should pass into history as the natural 
and true resultant of self-government that your elec- 
tion would surely mark the end of our great experi- 
ment, that free government must stand before the 
world thenceforth a confessed failure on American 
soil. You know, sir, — for your words have proved 
unmistakably- your knowledge — that your election, 
the ascendency of that party whose creature you have 
become, is not an exemplification or legitimate result 
of a government "by the people." You may seek to 
flatter yourself with the hope that it may be for the 
people. You may endeavor to believe that out of evil 
your abounding "luck" will bring good^to the nation 
and honor to 3^ourself. 

Ah, sir, if you had but lived up to the knowledge 
which you possessed, if you had but made true the one 
notable and worthy declaration of your life, if you 
had but declined to be a participant in the results of 
crime, if you had but refused to stand before the world 
as the representative of our American manhood, with 
the fruits of murder in your hands, if you had heark- 
ened to the blood of unnumbered victims crying out 
against that conspiracy the fruits of whose crime you 
now enjoy, if you had cast aside the proffered honor 
because it was tainted with fraud and refused the 
laurel of victory because its leaves were smirched with 
blood, if you had done this, the world at this moment 
would have been resonant with universal acclaim. 
15 



226 A MAN OF DESTINY. 

This would have been the birth-hour of a new and 
unexampled heroism. The ranks of the immortals 
would have been enlarged, and you, in the heyday of 
life, Tvould have been enthroned among those whom 
the ages offer not opportunity fitly to exalt and glo- 
rify. Then, indeed, sir, would the nation have known 
a new birth. The American people would have bowed 
at your feet in delighted recognition of your exalted 
worth. All would have rejoiced to have followed 
your lead and performed ^^our wish. The freedman 
would have linked your name with Lincoln- s in a new 
anthem of deliverance. His misguided but manly 
oppressors, rebuked by your exalted virtue, would 
have forgotten the scorn of the past and striven ear- 
nestly to undo the evil they have wrought. Our whole 
land would have counted itself honored above all other 
lands by such an act of integrity and patriotism, 
would have inscribed ^^our name upon the loftiest pin- 
nacle of renown, and to it would have directed their 
children's eyes through unnumbered ages as the noblest 
example that the world can offer of unflinching recti- 
tude and exalted virtue. Along with your name 
would then have been enshrined in every patriotic 
heart these words which must now remain an inefface- 
able brand upon jonr cheek— a blistering self-portrait- 
ure of shame : 

"A GOVERNMENT IS NOT BY THE PEOPLE WHEN A RESULT 
WHICH SHOULD REPRESENT THE INTELLIGENT WILL OF FREE 
AND THINKING MEN IS DETERMINED BY THE SHAMELESS 
CORRUPTION OF THEIR SUFFRAGES." 

THE END. 



The Inter Ocean. 



Why it is popular among all Classes 
of Readers. 



In all of its editions The In^ter Oceait has made so 
many improvements, and on all party and natural and 
moral questions the management has taken such high 
ground, that it is safe to say the paper has gained more 
friends within the last two years than any other political 
journal in Chicago. Within the year past it has brought 
out several special features, notably the '* Siva" Letters, 
the Industrial Letters of Robert P. Porter, the Foreign 
Letters of William E. Curtis and Theodore Stanton, the 
Religio-Physiological Contributions of Sidartha, which 
have given it increased reputation. In intelligent treat- 
ment and illustration through maps, diagrams and por- 
traits of wars and army movements, The Inter Ocean 
has always lead its contemporaries, and in handling topics 
related to the Egyptian war it has been in advance of any 
other American pa2:>er. 

The terms to mail subscribers, post-paid, are as follows: 

DAILY, including Sunday, per year, .... $12 00 

DAILY, exchiding Sunday, per year, . . . . . 10 00 
WEDNESDAY'S EDITION, with Musical Supplement, per 

year, 2 00 

SATURDAY'S EDITION, sixteen pages, per year, . . 2 00 

SUNDAY'S EDITION, sixteen pages, per year, . . 2 00 
SEMI-WEEKLY EDITION, published on Monday and 

Thursday, per year, . 2 50 

WEEKLY EDITION, per year, 1 00 

Sample copies sent on application. 



The Inter Ocean is one of the very best papers published. You 
always know where to find it, and it has succeeded in attracting to 
itself some of the best literary minds in the country. It has a head, 
and usually keeps it. People have confidence in it, whether they 
agree with it or not, and it is gaining in popularity and circulation 
every day. Its Saturday and Sunday editions are certainly marvels 
in their line. — Kewanee (111.) Courier. 



The Inter Ocean, of Chicago, is, without doubt, the cleanest 
and most respectable newspaper in Chicago. Neither is it behind 
any of the other papers in enterprise. It is a good newspaper in 
every way, always takes an honorable, straightforward course, and is 
ably edited. — Austin (Minn.) Transcript. 



The Inter Ocean is the ablest straight Republican paper in the 
"West, and is standard authority for the party. — Bolivar (Mo.) Herald. 



The Inter Ocean is without question one of the most influential 
journals printed in America to-day, its opinions in all matters per- 
taining to national affairs being more widely quoted and of greater 
weight than most people have any idea ot.— Sturgeon Bay (Wis.) 
Advocate. 



The Chicago Inter Ocean continues to grow in public favor. 
Its conservative and consistent course during and since the last great 
presidential campaign has won for it unrivaled prestige with the 
great mass of the Republican party and the respect and confidence of 
all parties. As an advocate of Republican principles it is careful, 
reliable and able, which is characteristic of the editorial department 
throughout. In enterprise it acknowledges no superior. Its con- 
tributors are of the very highest order of i^leni.— Three Bimrs (Mich.) 
Tribune. 

Address, THE INTER OCEAN, 

CHICAGO. 



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